Telstra signs $11b deal with #NBN

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Telstra has confirmed it has signed an $11 billion deal with the NBN Co to allow the new high-speed broadband network to use Telstra's existing network and infrastructure.

In a statement to the Australian Stock Exchange, Telstra said the agreement would be for 35 to 40 years and would see Telstra hand over all its broadband services to the NBN over the 10 years it would take for the new network to be completed.

Telstra will recommend to its shareholders that the deal be accepted.

Telstra and NBN Co have also agreed to product features and pricing for voice and data services, but these are yet to be released.

As part of the deal, Telstra has promised to spend $2 billion on upgrading infrastructure and migrating customers to the NBN.

Telstra's CEO, David Thodey, said the agreement ended the uncertainty surrounding Telstra's possible association with NBN Co and would allow his company to focus on customer service.
The agreement remains subject to approval by the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission as well as the shareholder approval which will go to a vote on October 18.

Telstra chairman Catherine Livingstone described the two-year negotiations as "complex", but said the decision to participate was made because Telstra could recover more value for the business "given the loss of value after NBN policy announcements".

The Government has signed off on the deal, which means the NBN will rent Telstra's underground network and start taking over its fixed-line phone customers.

But Coalition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull says it could be done more cheaply.
Mr Turnbull is critical of part of the deal that means Telstra and Optus will both agree not to use their pay TV cables to provide broadband services.

He said the NBN should use some of Telstra's copper phone lines to deliver the broadband more cheaply - but the deal makes no provision for that.

"What it is doing is wiping out any potential competition with the NBN," he said.

"Now these HFC cables, pay TV cables, pass well over 30 per cent of Australian households and they would be able to provide real competition with the NBN network and of course keep prices low."
Mr Turnbull said the deal was risky for taxpayers, who ultimately own the NBN.

"If it were decided, as it should be, to use a mix of technologies to deliver fast broadband to all Australians and to use a portion of the copper network, the Government will have to go and pay Telstra even more billions. Pay twice for the same copper network," he said.

Mr Turnbull said it would be too expensive for many of those who currently do not have internet access.

"It is poverty that is denying people access to the digital economy, not technology," he said.
"So you've got to have as a key priority making your access to broadband more affordable. The NBN, because they're wasting so many billions of dollars unnecessarily, will make it less affordable."

Tags: business-economics-and-finance, telecommunications, government-and-politics, federal-government, internet, internet, australia

Telstra's NBN deal - what it means

The federal government's $36 billion plan to wire up the nation to high-speed broadband cleared one of its last major hurdles today when Telstra agreed to an $11 billion deal to rent its infrastructure to the operator of the state-owned network.

What is the NBN and why is it being built?

The National Broadband Network is a high speed internet network, which is expected to deliver speeds of about 100 megabits a second to more than 90 per cent of Australian homes.
The majority of the network will be constructed of fibre-optic cables, using the cable ducts of Telstra, with more remote areas being connected with wireless and in some cases satellite services.

The network is run by a state-owned company, NBN Co. It cannot sell retail phone services and will provide services on the same basis to all retail companies, such as Telstra and its main competitor, Optus, a unit of Singapore Telecommunications, as well as smaller rivals such as iiNet.

 

The network has been a key policy of Labor since it won the 2007 election, as a way to overcome Australia's patchy and expensive internet services.

Private investment in infrastructure has been largely limited to the cities due to the country's vast distances and rugged terrain, combined with a low population density.

The network will require total capital expenditure of $35.9 billion and will need $40.9 billion in debt and equity funding. The government plans to put up $27.5 billion in funding, while NBN Co will borrow $13.4 billion from markets.

Why did the government and Telstra do a deal?

Telstra, the former telecoms monopoly, owns the most comprehensive phone network in the country.
NBN Co wanted access to that nationwide system of cables, ducts, phone exchanges and other infrastructure to form the basis of its network as it would make the build faster, cheaper and avoid duplicating assets.

Telstra wanted to avoid being left with a largely "stranded asset", a network that would be superseded by a better, faster state-owned one, and achieve some return for shareholders.

The deal between Telstra and NBN Co still needs to be approved by the phone company's shareholders, but it is not expected to face major investor opposition.

What are the political risks of the deal?

The network was a centrepiece of Prime Minister Julia Gillard's election campaign last year which resulted in a dead-heat vote and eventual minority government.

Since then Ms Gillard has struggled to implement her agenda and has suffered in opinion polls, which put support for her leadership at record lows and indicate that her Labor party would be wiped out if she were to call an election now.

But progress on the network could give her government a badly needed policy achievement and enable her to move onto her next major reform - a carbon-reduction plan.

The opposition has opposed the network as a giant waste of taxpayer money, and has promised to review the project if and when it comes to power. Depending on the outcome of such a review, parts of the rollout could be abandoned.



What impact will the NBN have on Telstra and its rivals?

Telstra has been spending heavily to arrest a decline in its market share and sacrificing short-term earnings to transform itself from a network-driven company to retail-driven one.

Many analysts believe Telstra will retain its position of market dominance, even after handing over its fixed-line network to NBN Co, and that the cash from that deal will enable it to expand into new areas such as Internet-based businesses and in new markets such as Asia, where it already has investments.
Telstra's opponents say the broadband network would encourage a level playing field, leaving phone companies to compete on pricing and product quality. Telstra's smaller rivals believe the company will in the short term be distracted by the task of separating the network out of the company.


What happens now?

The deal still requires the approval of Telstra shareholders, expected on October 18, while laws clarifying the structure of the network have yet to be passed by the Senate.
NBN Co has in any case forged ahead with its plans, rolling out fibre-optic cable in of Tasmania and, in May, starting to do the same on the mainland.

The process will be a long and is fraught with execution risk as millions of homes and businesses are migrated to the new network. How successfully the transition is handled, and how much market share Telstra retains, will be among the closely watched factors as the network is developed.



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Volatility: Democracy

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Filed under: American Revolution, Freedom, Peak Oil, Regulation Can't Work, Sovereignty and Constitution

History’s democratic movement has been humanity’s great hope. Wherever people have suffered scarcity and oppression, and wherever the human spirit striving to break its bonds has chafed at the stupidity and inertia, we have looked to the expansion of political and economic democracy as the vehicle of our liberation and the guarantor of this achieved freedom.

 

Concurrently with the industrial revolution and the rise of fossil fuels, humanity lofted the call to universal democracy as the logical and moral culmination of our political experience. But was democracy a trap? The rising movement was diverted to “representative” government. By now it looks like the goal was to misdirect the democratic impetus long enough for the elites to steal all the wealth produced by the oil surplus before restoring feudalism.

 

By now we who affirmatively strive cannot experience representative government, capitalism, elitism, as anything but blockages to our soaring, while all who aren’t rich and powerful increasingly experience these as oppressors and thieves. The poor always experienced them as such, and as we’re liquidated more and more of us are to experience what it’s like to be economically and politically poor, even if we’re not technically there yet.

 

So we experience the perversion of democracy as a negative assault, and as a blockage to our affirmative humanity. This is the basic political, economic, and psychological situation. In fact, the concurrence of the rise of mass democracy and fossil fuels is exact enough, while Peak Oil and the advent of neoliberalism have a direct causal relationship, that we have to ask if the democratic movement itself, not the ancient political idea but its efflorescence into mass politics, was really nothing more than an ornament of cheap oil. The criminals now want to prove that it was. Are we really going to let them do so?

 

Democracy is the logic of history. It’s our imperative to fight for it. A basic precept of the American Revolution is that liberty and concentrated power always grapple in a zero-sum conflict, and that to whatever extent a society allows power to concentrate, the citizenry must be actively vigilant against this power. This is an obligation imposed by freedom, and therefore an intrinsic element of it.

 

If the measure of freedom includes the measure of one’s will to be vigilant, then it follows that the measure of democracy itself includes the measure of one’s will to fight for it. This, at least, depends nothing upon oil or other material factors. All things start with an act of will.

 

This is fortuitous, since this same historical moment where we need this great act of will is also the moment where all conventional actions are blocked for all who lack wealth. So here again we find the concurrence of our affirmative and negative imperatives. For both self-transcendence and self-preservation we need to make the truly transformative action to redeem our democracy and restore it to its true path, such that it shall finally fully realize itself.

 

And what is the nature of this true democracy? I’ve written many times about the failure of representative government, about the fact that in its inception it was a sham, and (most recently here) about how according to the ideology of the American Revolution it has no necessary authority, but was only to be taken provisionally, based on how well it worked in action. I think the tenure of this provision has long since expired, and the results are in. Representative pseudo-democracy doesn’t work and is unworthy of us.

 

Instead the consummation of the democratic movement, and the only way out of the historical bottleneck in which we find ourselves, must be the achievement of positive democracy. I described it here:

 

What are the basic principles/practices? (In positive democracy, there’s never a clear division between principle and practice. There’s no citizenship other than through citizen action. The measure of one’s capacity for freedom is that one acts as a free citizen, as much as possible, and is always seeking to expand the bounds of freedom’s possibility.) Direct democracy, political freedom (meaning the opportunity to meaningfully participate), political participation itself, all of these on an equal basis. Material equality (defined as the absence of class stratification and wealth concentrations) is the prerequisite for equality of political opportunity. Food Sovereignty as a political and practical imperative. Land and natural resources are things of nature, and can therefore be the property only of sovereignty itself; Western political theory always recognized in principle with the labor theory of property that to gain a possession right on the land one must productively work the land. The things we call rights and enshrine in Bills of Rights. All of this arising from the people’s sovereignty and therefore the province of human beings only, while by definition other entities can only be servants with responsibilities, never persons with rights.

 

Economic democracy, worker self-management, distribution of, by, and for those who actually produce. All this as a self-actualization value in itself, as well as providing the material prerequisite for true political democracy, with the universal and equal opportunity for participation. This too is the realization of our humanity as well as the most effective way to attain wise governance.

 

So both politically and economically, positive democracy shall both achieve the best practical result as well as, in its very exercise, constitute the ultimate human process, the ultimate realization of our humanity itself. This is the horizon which beckons. This is the promise which dawned with the first rising of the democratic sun. The enemies of humanity have sought to obscure this sun with their clouds of menace and confusion. Today they wish to bring down the veil of blackest night forever.

 

But while they, in their typical elitist way, believe they obscure the sun from the eyes of benighted, earthbound wretches, it is in fact we the people who are the sun. And so it’s our choice to burn away the fog in front of us and bring infinite clarity to the world and to life.

 

In the end, we each must choose, and we must choose as a whole: Are we in fact wretches groveling in the mud under a darkening sky, or shall we be the soaring sun?

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Volatility: Constitutionalism and Positive Democracy

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Filed under: American Revolution, Anarchism, Freedom, Land Recourse, Law, Sovereignty and Constitution — Tags: federalism

Before proceeding, a few words about constitutionalism in general. A sovereign constitution is the basic form of the people’s sovereignty. This comprises the principles and practices which define a society, its true character and aspiration. A written constitution is then supposed to be an adequate expression of this sovereign constitution, and from there written laws are supposed to adequately supplement the written constitution in expressing the sovereign. (The distinction between such documents isn’t always clear. Is the Code of Hammurabi a constitution or a list of statues? The Ten Commandments? The Draconian and Solonic Codes? The Codes of Theodosius and Justinian? The synod which compiled the “official” Bible?)

As I’ve written before, by now we know that the only appropriate form of our sovereignty is positive democracy. We’ve learned how politicians, alleged experts and “elites” paid to rule us, are rationally and morally incompetent for this job. We’ve learned how in practice they’ll never do anything but aid and abet our anti-social enemies and commit crimes themselves. We know that the first proper attitude toward politics is to be anti-politician. (That’s a formulation I picked up from a blog post somewhere which I’d link if I could remember where it came form. It’s recommended as a good all-purpose answer to anyone in any situation who asks, “What do you politically believe/want?” To open up with, “For starters, I’m against politicians. Not just the current crop of crooks, but politicians period”, will often bring on agreement from others, which can be a good lead-in to more difficult topics.)

Most of all, we know about all political and economic elites that we don’t need them. We can rule ourselves. That’s the basic imperative of positive democracy: In the modern era, often called the democratic era, humanity has come of age. That is, we’ve achieved our age of majority and ought to be getting out of our parents’ house and into the wide world to find out who we are and what we can do.

But that means the democratic ideology and movement must evolve. We cannot stand still. To remain mired in belief in representatives and republics is really to regress. Belief in these was once a widening of the horizons of political thought, but that has long ceased to be the case. We now know that these are unworthy of us as democratic citizens and human beings, and that they don’t work anyway if the definition of work is that they make permanent progress toward expanding real political participation and broad-based economic prosperity. In the same way that capitalism has been proven to be a lie, since wherever its profit rate began to naturally decline it resorted to feudalist measures to prop it up, so representative government has renounced its role as a regent toward ever-expanding democracy, but instead sought to reinstate age-old authoritarian rule, albeit maintaining the sham trappings of elections, etc.

So we must now establish positive democracy. We owe it to ourselves, to our families and communities, to humanity, to history.

A democratic community may or may not choose to draw up a statement of principles. It would be more like the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man than like the main articles of the 1788 Constitution.

Why do it? If we draw up a New Compact here in cyberspace, it’s really a statement of principles for a new movement, and a proclamation that this movement is continuing the long-neglected work of the original American Revolution (here in America) and a similar democratic revolutionary work elsewhere. (I hope I don’t sound too Amero-centric to non-American readers and participants. I think these principles of democracy are applicable the same way everywhere which has been integrated into globalization. Certainly many of the cultural details will greatly vary, but not the basic anti-elitist imperative.) Even if you don’t personally care about such a statement, it may be a necessary stage of developing the movement consciousness and an enticement (to potential participants) along the road of movement-building.

What are the basic principles/practices? (In positive democracy, there’s never a clear division between principle and practice. There’s no citizenship other than through citizen action. The measure of one’s capacity for freedom is that one acts as a free citizen, as much as possible, and is always seeking to expand the bounds of freedom’s possibility.) Direct democracy, political freedom (meaning the opportunity to meaningfully participate), political participation itself, all of these on an equal basis. Material equality (defined as the absence of class stratification and wealth concentrations) is the prerequisite for equality of political opportunity (remember that anytime you see pseudo-democrats and fetishists of sham “process” rights like Greenwald and the ACLU, who support corporate “rights”, corporate speech, and therefore the total domination of politics by wealth). Food Sovereignty as a political and practical imperative. Land and natural resources are things of nature, and can therefore be the property only of sovereignty itself; Western political theory always recognized in principle with the labor theory of property that to gain a possession right on the land one must productively work the land. The things we call rights and enshrine in Bills of Rights. All of this arising from the people’s sovereignty and therefore the province of human beings only, while by definition other entities can only be servants with responsibilities, never persons with rights.

From there, we can discuss and seek consensus on provisions. The only rule is that every idea has to be pro-democratic and/or anti-authoritarian. Every proposal must head in this direction. The preferred tactic in dealing with all malignities is not to use power to affirmatively destroy them (unless this is absolutely necessary in self-defense), but to negatively destroy them through refusal to recognize or enforce their fraudulent “rights” and prerogatives. To give a clear example, we must declare that corporations are not persons, have no constitutional rights, and that if they’re to be allowed to exist at all, it’s only on what the democracy judges to be good behavior. Charters, just like federative delegates, must be subject to instant recall at all times. (I’m aware that by the time it’s politically possible to enact this as policy, it’ll be possible to simply declare corporations nonexistent, which is what I recommend. But a constitutional provision like this is a good example of the kind of statement of intent which can advertise the movement. At the same time it’ll be clear that the movement has room for more rigorous proposals. The written constitutional aspiration is a floor, not a ceiling.)

Here’s another example of how we seek to dissolve illegitimate power through non-recognition of it, this one not from constitutionalism but from law (but it’s the same kind of concept). I don’t say “criminalize” derivatives in the sense of arresting people and so on; I say outlaw them in the sense that they’re declared to be uncontracts, unenforceable in any court or by any police.

The same process of breaking corporate power and the power of concentrated wealth (and shrinking government in the process) can be applied to most or all things. For example with landed property: The democratic community can defend its own right to be on the land which it productively works. It would refuse to enforce any nonexistent property right on the part of an absentee landowner, who it would recognize as a thief. The community would not prevent itself from putting that land into production on its own, for its own well-being.

Anything which extends government and corporatism is bad. Anything which, explicitly or implicitly, merely wants to maintain these is probably bad, and at any rate is unlikely to be helpful. Every idea and act must have the goal of expanding democracy and shrinking elitist authoritarianism.

So to write a constitution is to perform the act of democracy in the grand sense, and gives a sense of what the democratic movement is about. In its details this can also clarify for ourselves and describe clearly to others exactly what we want to accomplish. This in turn should help clarify strategy and tactics.

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