30 Years of CommsDay; An interview with founder Grahame Lynch part 1

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To comms day live i'm tim marshall i'm a former comms day editor and now communications and corporate affairs consultant this is the first in a short series exploring a unique constant in an industry that has been and remains in continuous transformation where telecommunications has always been in perpetual evolution in the background and sometimes the foreground there's has been a publication charting that change with reliability that many might envy.

Of course, I'm talking about Communications Day itself, namesake for this podcast and at its core, an unassuming newsletter at times known as the Bible of Australian telecommunications. Instantly recognisable, sometimes feared, always well-read and something of a publishing success story in its own right. In this short series, we're celebrating the first 30 years of Communications Day.

And in this episode, we're going straight to the source, speaking with the founder, publisher, editor, commentator, event producer, podcast host, connector, and sometimes troublemaker, Graham Lynch. A man so entwined with his publication that his personal ex-handle is simply Comms Day. day. Happy to take a view. He's deep in the detail where others skim a uniquely positioned witness without necessarily having a horse in the race.

We thought it only made sense to start our review of the last 30 years by talking to Graeme, unpacking some big shifts, diving into a few colourful events and what we might learn from the past to guide us in the future. Graeme Lynch, welcome to your own podcast. Thank you so much, Tim. It's fantastic to be kind of on the other end of the microphone for a change. And I can't think of a better person to be doing this than you, given your long association with comms day and its formative years.

So thanks for having me on. Well, thank you for having me to have you. That's terrific. And now to get this out of the way, congratulations. Thank you. It is an extraordinary achievement for any publication. There must be at least a dozen and telco and tech publications that have come and gone in that period just in in australia and of course there have been many people who've contributed to the success of comms day.

What I want to ask first of all is, back in 1994, it's a long time ago, as you were setting up to launch Coms Day, how did you imagine things might play out? Well, I was young. And of course, when you're young, you don't have long horizons. I was in my mid-20s. I'd been a working journalist in a few different environments. So I saw an opportunity, funnily enough, to deliver news by fax.

That was we're gonna we're gonna go there yeah we'll go we'll go there but um you know i never would have imagined it would still be going in 30 years time you know i i entered the workforce in the early 1990s and in a recession so the the mindset very much of both myself and almost everyone i knew was survival you know getting to the end of the week hopefully keeping your job You know, that was very much the way one thought at that point.

So, you know, when I launched Comms Day, you know, I was just hoping to get through to the end of the year. I certainly didn't see it as lasting as long as it has. Remarkable. And I know, well, my view is I think a lot of listeners and readers of Comms Day are trying to be interested in that backstory, where it's come from, and even understanding it's been there for 30 years, where it all came from.

I just do want to go back to the months before the launch, and you were thinking about this idea that might get you up and running and through to the end of the year. What was it about telecommunications that made you think this is where you wanted to focus? Why wasn't it, you know, transport and logistics or the music industry, whatever? Yeah, look, I mean, I was working at an existing publication writing about telecommunications, and I guess what was attractive about it was a couple of things.

Firstly, Australia was going through the very early stages of a multi-stage liberalization of the industry. So you're going from a telecom monopoly to the introduction of Optus. Photophone had just launched when we launched Comms Day, almost to the same day, actually. One of our first issues of Comms Day covered Telstra tendering for a cable TV network, which of course became the HFC network that's still used at NBN today.

So there was all these things kind of launching. So that was one aspect of it. The second aspect was the emergence of the internet. And at this point I want to mention my business partner at the time, Jeremy Grigg, who was a friend of mine at university, who I guess talked me into it. A lot of it was his idea. And it wouldn't have happened without him. So I definitely want to thank him at the top of this podcast for the role he played in its formation.

And Jeremy and I, prior to starting Comms Day, had a lot of friendly discussions and sometimes debates, maybe even arguments about what was then the emergence of what we now know as the internet and the World Wide Web. I distinctly remember a conversation I had with Jeremy around that period about the Netscape browser, which was just taking off, and what that would mean for publishing. We had different views.

Funnily enough, probably his view that we completely gut the publishing world ended up being the correct one. So a lot of it was from that, which was, you know, you could sense that there was the beginning of something big happening and that there was a story to be told. And that, you know, formed the fundamental basis for what we ended up doing with comms day.

That's really interesting because it says to me that you guys weren't coming at it from a, I guess, a tech geek perspective in that you'd been very interested in the tech and wanted to tell that story or it gave you the opportunity to be around that tech because you loved it. You saw a bigger shift occur. There was a socioeconomic revolution. I mean, I hate to use that word. It's dramatic.

But, yeah, it was definitely, I mean, in retrospect, obviously, you know, a giant seismic shift in the fundamental basis of how society operates and how the economy operates and how wealth is generated. And there's been a whole lot of different consequences to come out of that. But as I say, you could sense the beginning of something big and that's really what did drive it, yes.

Yeah, so the market was breaking up from the traditional sense in telecommunications here and then you had the arrival of the internet. Yeah, yeah. Well, it turned out to be a good call but you're talking about that, you know, there's something changing here in publishing as well and you're going into that, I guess, with this notion that you can create a new product to cover this market.

There were so many temptations in internet publishing different models that occurred over the last 30 years subscriptions for email newsletters or facts for that matter weren't always the go-to method or the fashionable method of selling information.

Over that period i did want to just talk a little bit about your model of of publishing in the business model how did you go about in the early days of getting exposure and enough subscribers, on board there must have been a hustle there how did you get the ball rolling and then what's been the secret to keep that model going over all those years when information really just became free to an extent?

Yeah, it's a good question. The decision to embrace a subscription model originally was out of necessity because we didn't have a lot of startup capital. So one of the nice benefits to a subscription model is that it's very cashflow friendly. You're getting paid paid up front for something. You know, the alternative is an advertising-led model where more often than not, you're getting paid in arrears, quite often substantially in arrears, you know, 30 to 90 days.

So it was a fundamental decision driven by desperation, I guess, you know. But also based on observation, the antecedent of the comms day model is the U.S. Subscription newsletter model that actually dates back to the 1920s. Before the 1920s, the federal government in the U.S. was very weak. It didn't drive a lot of decision making or it wasn't particularly influential in the affairs of the average American.

That changed in the 1920s. and suddenly you had a whole lot of people living out in all four corners of the US who needed to know what was going on in Washington DC and that fostered the emergence of a subscription newsletter industry of specialist information you know whether it be about agriculture or about health care or or even even even um broadcasting you know a little bit later on all those decisions were driven out of Washington affecting what you could do with radio or tv stations

and licenses in all the 50 states. So that's where the model kind of came from. Explaining what was going on in D.C. To the rest of America with specialist knowledge and specialist detail that was never going to be carried in a mainstream newspaper. So our model was essentially the same. Explaining what's going on in the sort of the... The esoteria of the worlds of telecom regulation and policymaking and so on, and explaining that to the broader world.

Yeah, that certainly rings true. And that specialist information, I always used to reflect that or say to people who ask me, comms day would cover any big story in the industry and adjacent that was going to get covered in the mainstream press, the newspapers primarily and the websites.

But then absolutely everything else that went on in the industry i'm curious whether you ever considered or went about or how you went about ongoing marketing of the newsletter whether you needed to do that or did the product speak for itself a lot a lot of it was simply the people who we were writing about wanted to read it and they needed to pay for it to read it it's a very simple model so that's how early subscriptions were driven it was a much smaller industry

in those days, you could do a lot of stuff by word of mouth. So a lot of it was very simply the people that we would speak to in the major telcos or the government departments. We would say, if you want to read what we're writing about you and your competitors, you've got to subscribe. And people understood that. And people in the industry valued having that daily flow of information. So it did very well very early on, you know, I think it's fair to say.

You know, we knew it was a goer probably within its first 60 to 90 days based on the take-up, you know, to the point where, look, I can't vouch for this, you know, hand on heart, but I'm pretty sure we have a cash flow positive in genuine sense within the first 18 months. And, you know, I think from that point on, you know, apart from maybe one or two issues, which are more about accounting management than anything, it's been very, very successful ever since then.

Yeah, no doubt. And just one more question on that value proposition.

And coming back, I mean, you mentioned about specialist information and its value. What's the role and where does it fit or where does it fit? Is it a platform or a news provider or a community? I've sort of seen that community grow around it as the events emerge as well. Or is it something else or a combination? That's a really interesting question, Tim. And I think that's very much in the eye of the beholder.

I probably don't see that the comms day readership day-to-day, I don't see it as a community. I actually see it as a very atomized, dispersed bunch of people who are actually in competition with each other more often than not. So is that a community? That's an interesting question. But I think when we hold conferences and we get a few hundred people together in a room, I do think what you're saying about the community definitely manifests.

And there is commonality. You know, obviously, TILCOs all have a common interest in reducing what they perceive to be the burden of regulation. But also, government departments have some collective interests as well. You know, whether they be state, federal, you know, in the national security area, in the communications area, in the economic area, they have common alignments as well. And to the extent that comms day brings those people together,

but also on a daily basis, informs their worldview. view, I guess you could say that there is a community of sorts there. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think there's something in there around, there's a difference for an event that is run by an event producer as opposed to an event that is run by the publication. There seems to be, there's a bit of a common interest among the participants there.

Well, look, I was there in the late 90s in my first stint at Coms Day when you were actually working for big magazine publishers in different parts of the world. Yeah. We'll come back to that in a minute. Sure, yeah. In that time, we took a big leap. You mentioned you launched it as a fax, but we switched from subscription fax to email PDF, like revolutionary stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. honestly, it looks like about the biggest tweak to the model over all those years.

Yeah, to be fair to him, that was actually largely you who drove that when you were there. Well, yeah. And it probably owes that to you. Well, I remember just having some, you know, reasonably robust discussions about how that might play out or the virtues of that. I mean, there was a definite logic to it, but it was probably the biggest shift

over all those years. is. What do you remember about that decision and was it, you know, did you see that as a like thought or just a technological necessity? We're talking about diluting the value because people could forward it, those kind of things. It was a necessity. I mean, obviously with the fax, with the physical fax, it's difficult. I mean, you can forward a fax obviously, you can reinsert the fax output in a machine and distribute it to other people.

But sending something by email was definitely Definitely, in terms of losing control over where it ends up, there was definitely that aspect. But, you know, it was a move that had to be made. But from time to time, people still wonder why we send things out by PDF and not just a standard worldwide web interface for our content.

And there's a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, I think it differentiates us, makes us a little bit more special that we still come across in a format that's not dissimilar to how we started in 1994. The PDF looks exactly the same as the fax, you know, in terms of visual, how it visually portrays itself.

It makes us a little different. It creates a kind of unique document and a package that I think you lose a little bit when you stick things in hyperlinks on a worldwide webpage where the average person might not read half of it. So I think the advantage of what we do now is the serendipity for a reader of coming across something they might not have clicked on. And, oh, okay, that's interesting. I wouldn't have read that ordinarily.

So, I think the fact that we retain that curated format actually does expand the horizons of our readers a tad more than would occur if it was a standard World Wide Web interface for the content.

Yeah. So, that's why we keep on doing it the way we do it. Also, I like the permanence of the format. Yeah, this was kind of the record as it stood at that time of transmission. I think when you stick articles up on the World Wide Web, they get re-edited and updated and so on, and they lose their archive value a little bit. So there's that aspect as well, which includes all the mistakes and the errors and the misspeaks and so on. All that stuff is preserved in amber forever in a PDF.

That's funny. I do remember we had a couple of tries, if I reflect back, at creating archives of all of the back issues online. line. And I don't think there was a particularly great deal of value in continuing that forward. I'm sure there's plenty of organisations out there that are keeping an archive of comms day and that's great. I remember in the offices there we had printouts in folders of them.

I'm not sure you're still doing that. We do, there's a big storage depot in Artharman that holds 30 years or 25 years actually of comms day archives. It is a fire risk. It is a fire risk. It's insured for it too. I think at the end of the day, it's the immediacy that might be the value, right? It's a classic. It's right now or this week's worth of news that is the value. Yeah, look, we stopped doing an archive because the cost of doing it outweighed the value of people who needed it.

Because as you say, bigger organizations tend to archive everything that comes anyway. So you're duplicating a process that is already occurring. And even though, funnily, what I'm about to say contradicts what we're actually doing with this podcast, I don't like looking backwards. I'm very much of the fish and, you know, today's newspaper is tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper kind of school of journalism.

So I kind of like to move forward and I'm not a great person to hang out in the archives reading about what happened 10 years ago, to be honest. Maybe that's right. Right. It's funny. I can still remember after we went to PDF and got all of the subscribers onto email, there was still one fax holdout. I'm not sure if you can remember. I do remember. It was a late and very well-respected George Maltby, as far as I remember, who was the former OTC.

Yeah, well, special transmission just for him every day, yeah. The former OTC managing director, I think at the time he was the leader of the Australian Telecommunications User Group. Yeah. working for some of the early industry reforms, and we would literally print a copy of the newsletter and manually fax it for George. I'm not sure how long it went on for and when he'd had enough.

It made me reflect when I remembered that, that I guess in some ways, ComStay was really part of and has been part of a generational change in the sector. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, look, I mean, that's a good point because when we came to be the industry was populated almost exclusively by people who'd worked at a senior level at telecom australia because when its competitors such as optus and photophone and aapt started a lot of their executives were people who'd come from telecom right so all or expat executives from overseas of a certain vintage so there was very much that old guard of.

The ptt world that's a term a lot of people under 40 might not even have heard but you know the post telecommunications and telegraph department type people and and they're they've almost disappeared now there's still that people from that era you know in organizations like telsoc and so on who still are active you know in that sense but there are very few of those people still or working professionally anymore.

And what has happened, in fact, this is as good an opportunity as any to talk about this. One of the things that really shaped Comms Day was the fact that we shared our initial offices with one of Australia's first ISPs, which was MagnaData. And MagnaData were notable in the early days of the internet for hosting the websites for both the ABC and for what was then Fairfax newspapers, and it's now nine newspapers.

Papers so we we were kind of sharing this floor of a of a an old building in bathurst street in sydney with with this young company run run by a bunch of you know they were 23 24 year old guys who all gone to cranbrook together and we we had this sort of it was almost like being in a fish bowl with this kind of new business model and watching how they worked every day and going up to the pub with them on a friday night and hearing about all their problems and their challenges and their ideas.

Well, and Telstra virtually across the road. Yeah, it was a nice contrast there. In fact, you know what, I mean, I could talk about this now because it's like a good statute of limitations, but, you know, MagnaData used to do some things that were on blurry lines in terms of regulation, like using the fire alarm copper tie lines at the fire station next door used to deliver internet to people down Castle Ray Street and stuff like that.

But we sort of saw all that stuff. And to your point about generational change and the fact we were across the road from the Telstra International HQ as it happened. It was really interesting because you could sort of see both sides of the equation. Some of those people we worked with at Magnetata, I mean, one of them, Jason Ashton, is now running the fixed wireless operations at MBInco.

So, a lot of those people who came into the industry through that kind of rather scrappy ISP sector are now running big telecommunications operations in Australia.

Quite a few of them have already retired themselves so it's kind of quite a long time you know it's past since then yeah what are we doing here groan oh yeah someone someone has to catalog it all that's how i've got right that's an honorable role i mentioned that my first stint at comms day coincided with you being in well you were in hong kong and then the us yeah uh working on some of the big industry magazines yeah just tell me a little bit about your experience

working in the international telecom media as it were and do you think well how did that influence the way comms day covered the market here or maybe as in june yeah look i i was very ambitious you know i started comms day when i was i guess i was 25 years old and i i you know i i had all sorts of interesting experiences but when when you're that age if you if you start a of business early.

You don't want to get locked into it. You need to keep growing as a person. And being tied to a publishing company with daily deadlines, there's that real risk that you become tied to it and lose that capacity for personal growth. So about three years into it, one thing I realized was that I didn't know enough. You know, that my priors were very limited and I needed to go out and learn a bit.

So So, I kind of, decisive publishing, because of that business model that I described before, where I had a reasonably good cash flow model, I kind of felt I could leave it in safe hands. So, you know, it was people like yourself and the editors who were there at the time, Natalie Apostolou and Michael Sainsbury, who, of course, they both went on to do big things in other areas.

And I also want to mention Sally Lloyd who was working with me right from the start running the admin side of the company. Held it together I would say. She held it together and still does bookkeeping for me to this day so she's been definitely as big a part of the story as anyone. And I kind of felt I had that confidence, you know, I could go abroad and so on.

So I got, I guess I was sort of hit hunted for a job that no one else seemed to want, which is probably why I got it as an editor of some telecommunication magazines in Hong Kong that were owned by an American company called Advanstar that had just come out of chapter 11, had a merchant banker taking control of it, and they were kind of looking to build up their operations. So I ended up in Hong Kong.

They worked through this local Chinese publishing company called CCI that was run by an American guy called Tom Gorman, who his claim to fame was he launched Fortune magazine in China and also introduced American basketball to the Chinese media market. Okay, so he was a really interesting fellow to work with. And we inherited, we had Telecom Asia magazine, a Chinese translation called Telecom China. And when I joined, we launched a new magazine called Wireless Asia.

And we had a great little team there. And I'd be jumping on planes to go around Asia, you know, to all sorts of interesting places, to mainland China, to Indonesia, Singapore, quite a lot, as you might imagine. Thailand, Vietnam and so on and got this crash course in how other people do telecommunications, you know, in a regulatory sense, a policy sense the challenge, particularly challenges in people with very low incomes and how you adjust your cost base to meet that market and so on.

It gave me a very, very different view of things, I think, to if I remained in Australia where I would have just taken all the received wisdom wisdom and not challenged it. But because I had that time in Asia, I was very, very sceptical of some of the claims that were being made in Australia about various issues.

It gave me a different frame of reference. So that was just after the handover in Hong Kong to China in 1997, which is quite an exciting time there. And then about two years in, we'd done relatively well. And about two years in, the management of the American owner thought They'd transfer me across to the States and put me in charge of all their international magazines. So I was running America's Network magazine.

I had a dotted line for their Brazilian language, Brazilian market Portuguese language magazine. We had a whole bunch of subsidiary magazines we were running in spaces such as e-learning. And so on. But what was happening in America in that 1999-2000 period? There were two interesting things. Firstly, the dot-com boom, which everyone's aware of.

There's enormous surge in investment in internet companies, which created some of the brand names that are still around today that are big on the internet. Of course, there were a lot of casualties too. I'll get to that. The second thing, which is maybe less understood, is that in the 90s, America passed it to the Communications Act, which basically deregulated control of the exchange. So a competitor could come into an exchange and plug a D-SLAM in and offer an alternative service.

They were called the CELEX, the Competitive Local Exchange Carriers. So I was there, you know, like when I got to America, I barely understood what that was all about.

But by the time I left a couple of years later, I totally understood like what was about to happen in Australia because we were a few years years behind and that same thing didn't really manifest in Australia for a few more years maybe 2002 to 5 was when all that hit Australia so I kind of understood what was about to happen in Australia with the ability of competitive carriers to effectively use an incumbent's network,

but bypass them at the same time if that makes sense and that's obviously was the specific regulatory change, which led to the success of companies like TPG and IINET and Internode and all those companies that exploded during that mid-2000s period in Australia and created vast fortunes for the people who owned them. So that was the product of... What I saw when I was overseas and working for other telecom titles and on my own.

And it gave me some really, really interesting perspectives that I think really helped inform the way comms day approached a lot of those issues when they started to manifest in Australia. Well, that's great because I think context is so valuable in any reporting, any commentary, country and you would agree with me that from time to time you see reporting on a whole bunch of issues, not just telco, where something appears either accepted or observed as, wow, this is a world first.

I mean, in actual fact, there's been a whole run up to it. It may have occurred somewhere else. There's a whole bunch of factors behind that and have made it a reality now, it's not so much a revolution as an evolution, as it were.

I'm interested as well in what you were saying, and I think we'll come to this in our next episode as well in this series, and that is the constant tension between telecommunications markets at once being nationalistic and national in their design and definition, but part of a global ecosystem, even a global machine, what some people say. Yeah, I agree with you. Those experiences must really have, well, would have informed a lot in the way ComStay positioned and was able to just

take a level position through the years. Yeah, I mean, and it worked both ways. I just want to make this point now because it might not come up later in our discussion. But when I was in America, there were a lot of telecom magazines that were like eight or nine in our competitive set. Wow. Well, there was a lot of ads, right? There was a lot of ads, that's fair to say.

But the thing I brought to the debate, you know, what impact did I make as just an Aussie expat editor of one of eight or nine magazines? What I brought to their debate there was a sober evaluation of the GSM versus CDMA wars. Because you might remember there was that real competition, you know, which one's going to win kind of thing. And the Americans, as you might expect, were all pretty patriotic and gung-ho for CDMA.

And that was all they really knew. and of course there was an incredible industry lobby in their ears on a constant basis you know pushing them to write in that direction but i just come from asia and australia obviously where gsm was the big thing and i'd gained a very keen appreciation for why gsm was a superior standard even if it wasn't a superior technology and you know they were because of things like the standardized roaming, which obviously creates a great revenue opportunity,

particularly for countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, where people are going over borders all the time. Roaming was a really important thing. That wasn't appreciated in America because most Americans never roamed, barely left their states.

So there was all these aspects to GSM that weren't understood by Americans, but I thought lent it a certain inevitability that it would become the dominant ecosystem in the world because America is but one country of 190, and what works in the rest of the world will tend to prevail. So I was really big on that debate there, and that was what I brought to America.

It gave my salespeople incredible heart palpitations to read some of my stuff because obviously all the pro-CDMA appetizers were like, who the heck is this guy?

You know you know what sort of foreign agent is this fellow advocating for this foreign technology but but i mean i don't want to sound too cocky but i was right and well you're right at the very least you're fresh eyes right yeah yeah the fresh eyes and and the different perspectives i i was right and that gave me a certain confidence as a as an analyst and as a commentator to to come When I sort of returned to the fold of comms day, whenever that was 2002 or whatever.

To, I guess, gave me a certain confidence that, hey, my perspectives do come from places that other people don't share, and that I had something to contribute, which added, I think, a layer of authority and credibility and a point of interest for what Comms Day did from that point on. Yeah, that's great. And we will come back to some of those things, including technology as religion in our next episode on this chat.

But before we move on to some of the bigger picture industry discussions, just one more thing about comms day itself for you as a publisher. Look, it's pretty fashionable these days to talk about purpose. I personally think it's useful from a business marketing perspective, getting to the heart of a business purpose and crafting a brand and consistent execution along those lines. You can go a long way with that.

There's something else for me in telecommunications. I've always said as an industry, it enables more good and positive impact than bad. It's an industry I've been happy to work in over the years for that reason. But what do you reckon? If I had to ask you, given the longevity and success of Commerce Day, what's the purpose of fulfilling this role as a platform for ideas and news in this sector specifically? I guess the question, Graeme, is why do you do it?

It's actually funny. You know, like, there's been various stages of comms day where I have asked myself that question. And I'll give you some examples. Like when Telstra was privatizing and because of the sheer breadth of the number of people who own shares in Telstra, you know, all the newspapers pretty much had a dedicated Telstra reporter, you know, for a period there. And you're competing against publications with much bigger resource nets than

your own. And sometimes you think, you know, you get scooped from time to time or... PR people like to see their stuff in the Australian or within reviews, so they favour them over you, that kind of stuff. It could be quite dispiriting at times. And that maybe also happened to a lesser extent around the NBN wars, which sort of, I guess, were 2009 to 2014. That was about a five-year period where the newspapers and the serious broadcasters like the ABC and so on were all over that issue.

And you just feel like you're panning away. way. Your legs are padding away in the pool just to stay afloat sometimes. So yeah, sometimes I do kind of question what value were we adding in that sense. I always think self-doubt can be a positive thing as well as a negative thing. So I like to have a bit of self-doubt. It's a good attribute to have when you're running your business. Teach me about that, Graeme. We'll talk later.

Here's a funny thing my kind of view on our purpose has evolved quite a bit probably from about that 2015 period onwards so the last 10 years where for whatever reason you know this is not for me to analyze but the mainstream media don't report on telecommunications really in any great depth anymore you know some people do a good job you know at this is the consumer websites like like Whistleout and Gizmodo and so on, do a good job, you know, doing price comparison type journalism.

The newspapers are very good if there's a strong financial story, you know. 95% of what happens in the telecom sector barely gets picked up by anyone anymore. So I actually sort of do feel we play a pretty essential purpose in providing oxygen to things that would otherwise be unreported. And I think that's our purpose these days.

In a period where there's decline in the quality and quantity of media reporting of society at large, which we play our little role in keeping that flame burning in a particular industry that happens to be a fundamental one to Australia's economy and society. And that's what I see is what we do now.

And hopefully I've got many years ahead of me yet, but one cannot fight the passage of time. One would hope that when I move on, that we will continue to fulfill that purpose, you know, in whatever way is required in the future. Well, I think that's very noble, for one. But, yeah, that is a clear purpose, and I think that one that is certainly needed in any market, frankly, and in changing times, no doubt.

Look, thanks for sharing all that, indulging those questions around Tom's day and its insides, It's inside, it's laundry, if you want to put it that way. I think that's really, really interesting.

I think it's remarkable how steady Comsday has been for all those 30 years, especially when we consider a market that is unrecognizable from what it was in 94. Rise of mobile, drawn-out sale of Telstra, introduction of competition, the entrepreneurs that followed, NBN and high-speed broadband, cloud, global tech.

You know it's remarkable what a customer whether they're consumer or or enterprise has got at their fingertips today compared to back then goodness me little boring people with talking faxes early the change is spectacular but i'd like to take a bit of a look what's actually driven some of that change we've touched on some of it i guess already it just it's it comes up personally i like to To think of telecommunications as the intersection of technology and innovation,

economic and social policy, finance and investment, regulation and protection. It's right there in the middle and comms day sits there too.

Look, we've chatted before, we've mentioned it here, comms day history being more or less the same time frame as the public internet. didn't it? To an extent, you could make an argument, everything that's occurred one way or another in the sector, it's been about enabling and dealing with that growth. And that was the trend that you and Jeremy, your colleague, were picking up.

Early on. Tell me, as someone who's been observing the industry so closely for those years, out of all of the factors of evolution, what do you think's been the biggest influence on industry change? We've talked before about technology really being the foundational disruptor. What do you think? Yeah, look, it's technology. It's never been something dreamt up by a political legal advisor, or banker. Yeah, that's not what drives positive change. It does drive change, definitely.

I'd be silly to deny that. But in terms of the big seismic shifts in the industry, they've all been a result of technology innovations that perhaps weren't even seen at the time. I mean, I just mentioned before about D-SLAMs and how that drove a competitive local exchange sector in America and how that took off in Australia.

I mean, the innovation there, of course, was taking what previously filled an entire giant multi-floor exchange building and turning it into a little miniature multiplexer that could duplicate all the same functions. It could sit in a tiny little footprint on the floor next to the exchange machinery. Ditto a whole lot of other little things that don't sound that remarkable in isolation, but which drove a lot of change.

I mean, big one was the ability to employ multiple colors on fiber optic, which enabled the amazing use of different wavelengths and the amazing multi-terabyte capacities that you can get on a fiber optic cable today. That wasn't always a given or a constant. That had to be developed. It had to be commercialized, which is often the hard bit of all this stuff. There's lots of things that go on in the labs. Actually getting it to market is another question.

Yeah, but probably the biggest, the big elephant in the room is the role that China played in making technology more affordable for the masses. I actually think of all the things that have happened to telecommunications, the role of China in making it all happen is often underplayed or understated. Now, maybe I'm a little bit biased because I was sort of located in Hong Kong in the late 90s when this was all starting to happen.

But the simple fact of the matter is that you wouldn't have the pervasive spread of internet technology in a mobile phone in almost everyone's hands if it wasn't for the scale economies and the productization capacities and capabilities of China and what that brought to the world. So I kind of look at, that's how I look at these things.

You know and it's important to remember where you came from all of the technologies that we take for granted right now have been around for a long time but were simply unaffordable back in the 1980s or 1990s you just mentioned how telcos have a very, nationalistic bent which is a result of every country having its own licensing regime for telcos and having it grow out of the National Telegraph or Postal

Service you know as the common And that was also the case for the vendor community for a long time. Every country in Europe had its national vendor champion. You know, there's Marconi in the UK, Alcatel in France, you know, Philips in Holland, Ericsson, Nokia. You know, America had its, you know, Lucent, its Motorola's and so on. Japan had NEC and Fujitsu. Australia had Exicom and JTEC and AWA, if you go right back. Everyone had their own vendor champions.

What happened, of course, in the 1990s with the WTO was kind of removing a lot of those nationalistic props.

In fact, favoring your own vendors became illegal under the WTO dictates in the early 1990s, 93 actually. And that created that flat world that allowed the telecom sector to gain global scale economies and to drive costs down to where... People in quite poor countries now expect to have a mobile phone and an internet connection and the two things went hand in hand and without one the other couldn't couldn't have happened.

That's that's that's really interesting so there was the the cost cost equation changed and therefore the availability the spread not just for the of the network but the technology of the run over the network the usable use usefulness of the network and the use of the the network became ubiquitous that's actually the change of the last 30 years it might have actually without those factors you mentioned occurred much

slower and i guess as a world we wouldn't we we would be dealing with a different ecosystem than than we are now it might be more primitive yeah oh absolutely but you know like we we take i use this small letters not big letters That is universal service for granted.

But it wouldn't have been necessarily affordable in many societies or possible to have pervasive mobile phone coverage or what I call web tone, the expectation that you can connect to a DSL or a fiber network in almost every metro location worldwide.

None of that would have happened. No, and to an extent, Ubiquity supports the critical mass that actually then- Attracts the investments that create the progress in what, there's two words, obviously, the miniaturization of devices, you know, I use the D-SLAM example, and the mass marketization of devices and technology, you know, so that D-SLAMs, which were an example I just used, are a great example of it, you know, where-

Where the cost just became a fraction within a few years because China was just pumping out so many of them, that grew a market that actually also gave scale economies to the European and American manufacturers as well. So the rising tide lifted all the boats for a period there. You know, you reminded me of an anecdote I'm aware of. You know, I used to work for Alcatel-Lewis. Yes, you know this better than me probably.

Which was previously Alcatel, the French company, which had acquired STC, which was a very much an Australian independent outpost of the British company, STC. But right until the late 90s, Alcatel was running a factory in Alexandria there in Sydney, producing switches, which were being exported to China. Yeah, that's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. And a lot of people don't realize how recent the rise of China is in a sense.

One of the first things I did when I lived in Hong Kong, I was at Telecom Asia, one of our sales people had signed a deal with this unknown company called Huawei to do their first ever English language marketing collateral. And a couple of us went back and forth to Shenzhen, which in those days was a big deal because it was a foreign immigration border. It took, you know, it was a happy day to get across the border and, and I made the visit to them.

And, and yeah, they, they, it was funny because they, they, they had had literally zero exports at that point. We're talking 19, early 1998, they'd, they'd sold a PABX to Hutchison in Hong Kong and they considered that an international foreign win because you take what you can take, right? And, you know, they had grand plans at the time. But I vividly remember this. They actually were saying to us, we've got to become big overseas because until we do, no one will treat us seriously in China.

And because in those days, Ericsson, you know, Alcatel, as you mentioned, they were getting all the contracts in China. And the Chinese companies labored in their domestic market under a perception that they were inferior. So Huawei, very early on, realized we've got to build up our international brand. They didn't even know what a brand was really in those days. Our luster, our reputation. So they went for Hong Kong. They went for Thailand, funnily enough.

And in the early 2000s, they started to make some big breakthroughs internationally. And that was when they took off in their domestic market. And a lot of people don't realize that, that the Chinese vendors had a worse reputation issue locally than they did internationally at that point. Well, I think that's right. And I think if I recall, Huawei's early on ambition wasn't just about being a great telecom or technology vendor.

It was actually becoming the archetype Chinese multinational company or Chinese company that took on the world, irrespective of the sector. So the strategy around getting big overseas was actually all part of that. And it was regarded as a very aberrant company in Chinese terms. It had a sort of staff democracy, you know, staff-owned shares in it. And it employed people with majors in English literature and things like that, which was sort of unknown for a Chinese technology company.

A lot of people found in China thought Huawei was a very kind of odd, un-Chinese company. And, of course, they parlayed all that into a great success and the rest is history and became the dominant influence on how everyone else did business as well. Everyone had to adapt and change to suit the kind of pace that they set. Huge waves of influence. And you know that having worked at Architel. Yeah. I worked there through the merger.

And we'll come back to kind of how that story ended in the next episode. Certainly, China and those players had a huge impact on the speed and the ubiquity, the way technology went around. But I'm curious where some of that innovation has come from over the years because I think the model generally has always been about helping carriers and service providers to retain and add value to their existing investments, right? There's just incremental change.

But we also know that every now and then, then innovation comes along that upends the thinking. Driving a new class of player. You mentioned D-slams. It wasn't particularly radical, but it was probably a tech fix that was put in rather than a revolutionary innovation. But if you look at mobile internet and over-the-top players and cloud and now Leosats, you know, in your observation, what are the preconditions for those technology disruptions? Where do they come from?

And then what's the flow-on impact to the telco ecosystem that's already in place? Yeah, look, I mean, there's a thousand ways I could answer that. I mean, I'll go back to what I just mentioned about that twin phenomena of you need miniaturization and marketization to drive change, more disruption. You know, that's an obvious analogy at worst for what's happened with satellites.

Satellites you know and you know for 30 years we've had these big clunky geosats you know tens of thousands of k away from earth doing the same thing with not a lot of change and then the innovation of course was to make these things a lot smaller and having them orbit closer to the earth which which solved a whole lot of issues around things like spectrum reuse latency all the, traditional negatives that came with GeoSats, that was the innovation there.

You, you compressed the size of the thing and the distance from earth that we should operated and that drove an innovation where, and then we're only at the beginning of it. You know, there's just a lot of the disruption from the, that's probably really yet to be seen. You can make the same arguments about things like mobile phones, for example. A lot of people like to think the iPhone was the big moment where the mobile sector changed. In a mass market sense, yes, it was.

But you might recall Nokia had its communicator phone that predated it by a few years. I used to carry one around Bangkok and people looked at me like I was a Martian. It would make me clunky fold out by typing on the keyboard. But, you know, that was an essential. I recognized very early that amazing ability to have a computer in your pocket and the beauty of that when you're a journalist who's on the road traveling a lot.

When I could marry having that Nokia communicator and that ability to run my business off it with roaming and that ability to go around different countries, it was, for me, very transformative. In a personal sense, you know, that it gave me a freedom that I didn't necessarily have before. So, yeah, that's what I would say, you know, that it's often the innovation's not coming from something new. It's coming from working out a new way and a better way to do something that's there right now.

And that is, you know, as I said, you know, with DSLAMS, it kind of miniaturized an exchange. Mobile phones are an obvious example there. And I think if you kind of look along the continuum of technology disruption in this space, it's often been about that kind of thing. And what Apple did with the iPhone was a little bit like what GSM did with its standard.

It brought in an ecosystem with all the apps behind it and all that stuff, which, of course, Google has very, very successfully emulated and perhaps even improved upon with Android. Android, and you go right back to Microsoft's Windows, which is still the most pervasive operating system today, was just a blatant carbon copy ripoff of the Apple operating system. It just made it cheaper and more accessible. And then Apple sort of did that back with the iPhone ecosystem.

But that's what drives change. When someone takes something that has been, takes a great idea, but not necessarily executed executed well, and then improving it. So it's often about increments, I guess. That's a very convoluted way of answering your question, but it's the best I could do. Well, I think you're right, and we might get to it in our next episode as well where we start to talk about the OTT players. If a company sees a need and it makes commercial sense, they will invest in

the innovation and make that leap, and that fits in there. Yeah, I think they're all good points. I'd like just to talk a little bit now about governments and their effect on change. Certainly like to think they're in control or at least give that impression.

And we'll talk in our next episode a bit more about the bigger picture government intervention around global markets and so forth. But first of all, I guess, given we're reflecting over past years, what do you think is the right balance for governments in how they manage so many competing interests, particularly when it comes to market competition? And as you know, as they say in the legislation, the long-term interests of end users. Which is a peculiarly Australian thing.

Yeah. Look, as I said before, you know, a lot of what shaped this industry was the influence of the WTO, and that was all very American-driven in the early 90s. And in also, you know, a lot of different ways, America put a lot of pressure on a lot of other countries to open up their telecom markets. You might recall in the 1990s, there was a big phenomenon of American phone companies, of which there were many because they had that bell, regional bell system with all the regional monopolies.

So you had these big cashed up companies that were suddenly facing competition at home that wanted to go out and expand into other markets. And they bought into other countries, whether it would be privatizing incumbents or financing competitive challenges. And of course, we saw that in Australia with Optus, and one of their early investors was Bell South, which was the American bill that's sort of based around Atlanta, that area in the States.

It doesn't exist anymore, of course, because they've all been reabsorbed by AT&T and then Verizon. What the U.S. government pushed onto the world, with their acceptance and acquiescence for the most part back in the early 90s, actually probably had a bigger influence than anything, you know, with all due respect to people in the Department of Communications. You know, probably much more profound than anything an assistant secretary in Australia has ever done.

And, you know, to be honest, I actually don't really see anything. Maybe I'm just being a little dismissive or a bit unfair even. I don't really think governments have done much good. I'm not saying they haven't had an influence. I don't think they've been particularly responsible for improving outcomes. Some people of good faith would argue with me on that and say, oh, if it wasn't for the universal service mandates, people in the bush would never have had comms. And maybe that's correct.

But for the broadest mass of people, I don't really think governments had much of an influence on the quality of each of the communications experiences. I guess it comes from, to an extent there's, there is gonna be recognition of a legacy here and that these, these infrastructures, the organizations that built them were by and large state organization.

So how does that, how does that obligation flow through into the future after you make those decisions around liberalization and to what extent governments responsible Responsible for getting that structure right. Yeah, look, from that perspective, yeah, you're absolutely correct. If you're looking back beyond the 80s, governments were responsible for the development of telecommunications networks around the world. I mean, America was an exception, actually, of private de facto monopolies.

For the most part, it was an offshoot of the post office or the telegraph company. So yeah, I can't deny on that basis that the development of networks was driven by government and perhaps to some extent, the fact that government has deeper pockets and perhaps longer investment horizons meant that you had infrastructure that served social good as much as economic good. You know, absolutely not denying that.

Yeah. I think as we've discussed, Leosats are interesting here as well, I guess as a little case study because they certainly provide a great service, but without some kind of subsidy or change in their business model, they're not going to meet that traditional universal service needs in terms of price. And there'll be other examples. How should governments manage the risk of innovators just cherry-picking the best parts of the market?

Yeah, look, Leo, that's an interesting question because the way you framed your question is correct in the present where, you know, effectively Starlink has a monopoly and because it's decided to really jump the gun and provide, you know, a couple of hundred megabits, you know, as a kind of standard, by definition, prices for that technology leap and it's expensive and it's obviously not that affordable for the average person in Samoa or Mongolia. Yeah.

So, yeah, you're absolutely correct in the here and now. But if you look at a scenario where, you know, let's say in five years' time, you've got Amazon Kuiper, potentially. You've got Telesat, which is sort of partly Canadian subsidized. You've got OneWeb.

You've got at least two Chinese Leosat constellations that we're aware of and reporting on at comms day under development, which it's not clear to the extent they have state support, support but you could bet your bottom dollar that at least one of them will eventually because obviously that's... Or there may be a law that allows state support to be easily imposed.

Yeah. So when you have a situation where there might be five or six pervasive Leosat constellations I wonder what that might do to price. And we can observe what happens in the mobile market when you have because a great thing about mobiles is you've got 180 national markets around the world of all different sizes so you can see what happens when you've got a duopoly and then you can see what happens when you have a third telco and a fourth telco and all those things can be measured and mapped.

We know that in mobile markets a third operator tends to substantially underprice the leading two and a fourth one only enhances that effect. It's often quite market the differences. I mean, to use an example in Australia, a good deal on Vodafone is a lot better than the standard deal on Telstra for mobile. There's quite a lot of price differentiation in our mobile market here that reflects in their ARPUs as well.

There's a substantial difference in the ARPU that Vodafone generates in Australia compared to Telstra. Is that going to happen in Leosats? Yes. Particularly when you have someone like China, who is not going to price at a premium level, they're going to price for take-up. And of course, those Leosats are flying over the rest of the world 95% of the time with unused capacity.

So presumably, they're going to offer some pretty keen competitive services to make sure there's utilization of those satellites when they're not over the mainland. What's that going to mean? So that's what I was saying before. I don't think we quite appreciate yet what might be happening in LeoSats. I think there's still a lot to play out there.

Yeah, I think you could be right. And as we get to our time on this episode, and just to tie off this section of change influences, we've talked about tech and then we've talked about government and whether there is a role and how that works.

Just to tie this off, what about investors and business innovators? The bet always is that they can see the future, But to an extent, generally, they'll follow the value, particularly when I look at examples, as we've discussed, of unbundling Telstra's local loop back in the day. What's your view on investors driving change? Can they? Do they? Or are they simply actors within the world? Look, I mean – Technology and government.

Look, I mean, it's almost a topic in itself that you could speak for hours about. You know, what are the drivers of investment in the network space? Some of it's about where the opportunities are. So, to give you an example, when the Australian government decided to build the NBN, well, that was pretty much it for private investment in fixed networks.

So, you've had a few little, there's a few what I would call fringe things in areas like new housing developments and apartments but overall that's a big arena that australian investors can't play in now and obviously you know with again with the barriers to entry with some things like mobile networks and so on people have hadn't had a go at a fourth one but no one else it's not going to happen again there's not going to be a national fourth mobile network ever in Australia.

Let's just be realistic about that. So investors go to the places where there are lower barriers to entry or there are opportunities or they're not crowded out by existing government activity. So in Australia, what does that mean? Data centers. That's been the most active space in digital infrastructure in Australia. To the extent we've created a couple of really interesting companies like Next DC and AirTrunk that punch above their weight in world terms.

It does show you the power of what's possible when an investor has a kind of uninterrupted view or an unobstructed view of a particular opportunity. Australia is good at it and we have created companies that play well in those sorts of spaces. It's an interesting one because Because so much of what happens now is driven by the needs of the big cloud companies, like Google and Amazon and so on, you know, they're responsible.

I saw something on LinkedIn the other day, someone had calculated that the big web companies or cloud companies have now built nearly 60 submarine cables around the world, which I was obviously aware they were building cables, but I was surprised by that number, 60 is. But of course, they're driving a lot of the build decisions for those independent DC companies I just named, like AirTrunk or NextDC.

If you haven't got one of those big cloud companies as an anchor tenant, you're probably not building your data center. So they're really, really important now in deciding what other people do in investing in, I guess, the ancillary or support infrastructure that is needed to keep the cloud going. Data centers, subcables have been two really good examples. So that's what's actually driving it a lot these days, I think. What does Amazon want? What does Google want?

Right. What does Microsoft want? That's the really, really big aspect of driving independent investment decisions. That's interesting. Clear runway, getting in, being relevant to those big customers. But finally, just to pick on something you said there about those, you know, some of those Australian companies in data centers that are punching above their weight, just maybe as an example.

Example, are there particular characteristics or behaviors in those companies or among that leadership that enable them to really be active and rapid?

Yeah, look, it's interesting. I remember when I was studying high school history, which is one of the few things I was good at at school, there was this sort of whole theory about, I think they called it the big man theory of history, which is that history is not really determined by social. So it's the great man theory. Sorry, that's what it's called. It's not really determined by broad social movements or trends. It's often, you know.

Determined by the actions of highly influential and charismatic individuals who play leading roles in their societies. And look, maybe my view is a little bit jaundiced by the fact I'm a journalist and I interview people. That's what I kind of do on a daily basis. But I subscribe to that a little bit in terms of describing how digital infrastructure investment investment is driven. A lot of it is because of the passion or the idiosyncrasies of individuals and what they bring to it.

It's not broader. It's not collectivized. You know, if Bevan Slattery woke up tomorrow, and I don't want to isolate him. He's just a good example. If Bevan Slattery woke up tomorrow and decided, I'm sick of all this. I want to retire. I think that might have a meaningful impact on on future investment in the Australian space because there aren't many people like him.

And, you know, Robin Kuda, who started AirTrunk, interestingly, an alumnus of that Bevan Slattery world, you know, he worked for Bevan. You know, again, an individual who's got some quite unique perspectives and insights and an ambition. And put it this way, a lot of those things wouldn't have happened as the output of a committee or board. It was driven by individual passions and views and desires and probably they've had to fight committees or fight boards to prevail on a lot of these things.

So that's sort of my view on this. A lot of it is very highly dependent on the actions of a very small group of individuals. To change the subject this is one of the reasons I'm always very sceptical about the efficacy of government deliberation and decision-making in this space because it allows people. It allows no room for the imagination of these individuals. It doesn't find a way to incorporate that or recognize it and how they reach a perspective on what's happening in the world.

That's a very convoluted, elaborate way of saying that a lot of the imagination and ambition of Australian telecoms has occurred as a result of the energies and activities of a handful of individuals. Rituals well that's the trend i am and i'm curious about that just to bring it back to that that point you were making about your observations as an editor and as a journalist.

Through hundreds if not thousands of interviews over the years you're you're you know you're noticing you know consistencies and certain traits coming up over over time where certain recurring themes, you might say, that separate people who, general participants in the sector against those who are out there to make the change, right? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, look, with all of that, I do wonder about the balance of change.

We keep seeing it. Of course, I guess some of the big interesting things we'll really see panning out in the near future might be the maturing of generative AI, and we'll We'll discuss that in our next episode as well and the influence of geopolitics. But that's a wrap for this episode of this short series on the first 30 years of Communications Day. My name's Tim Marshall and I've been speaking to ComStay founder, Graham Lynch.

I look forward to speaking to you in the next episode when we get into some of the big themes and big events of the last few decades and look perhaps further ahead. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Graeme.