NBN documents will not be released by bidders

Even in light of the termination of the NBN process, the groups who entered bids for the Federal Government’s National Broadband Network have refused to make their bid details publicly available.

The refusal to provide the public with a look into what the successful bidder would have offered the government was made this week when Axia, Optus, the Tasmanian Government, TransACT and Acacia all turned down the request for the bidding documents to been seen.

The documents would remain hidden since they were commercial in confidence, which was a decision the bidders echoed, according to a spokesperson for Stephen Conroy, the Communications Minister.

The lengthy speculation as to which group would win the bid to build the national broadband network that would reach 98 percent of the population with $4.7 billion of public funding was ended when the tender process was terminated on Tuesday by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Conroy.

None of the bids that had been entered were satisfactory, according to Kevin Rudd. The network would now be a fibre-to-the-home broadband network that would cover 90 percent of the Australian population and would be build by a government run corporation said Rudd. Only an open access, wholesale service would be provided by the corporation and it would be majority owned by the government.

The idea of the corporation will solve many of the regulatory issues that have dogged competition for some time and for this reason it has been met with approval from a large proportion of the industry. Details of why the government felt that the original bids were not satisfactory or even what the government plans are now are currently limited.

Before the tender process was termination many of the companies involved had spent million preparing their responses and government itself spent $20 million on it tender process.