Simpler broadband laws demanded in Australia

Calls have been made on the government in Australia to make laws simpler when it comes to ‘cherry pickers’ and the National Broadband Network.

The calls have come from the boss of the fourth largest broadband providers in the nation TPG Telecom. He has asked the government to simplify new laws that have been designed to protect the National Broadband Network from ‘cherry pickers’.

The government had said that it would be introducing amendments that would clarify laws relating to operators building networks that could compete with the NBN. The new rules were set to apply to only networks that are able to provide high speed broadband services to residential and small business owners. However, TPG boss David Teoh said that the new provisions would cause issues with competition in places where NBN-comparable telecommunications networks were already serving customers.

He said: “It’s annoying. It’s very discouraging in the sense that CBD areas are already served by lots of fibre networks. There should be a rule that excludes CBDs because these areas are mainly populated by big businesses and all those businesses are already connected by other fibre networks.”

He added that the rules should not apply in the 2km radius around CBD areas, stating: “They should worry about consumers and households rather than businesses in CBD areas. They should make the rules simple, so you don’t have to go through all this complex change and costs.”

TPG has recently reported healthy profits, and Teoh said that he was very pleased with the results in the six months leading to the end of January. He said that the results showed that the company had managed to cope with the raid on its broadband customers by Telstra.

Source – The Australian