30 Years of CommsDay; An interview with founder Grahame Lynch part 2

Music.

Hello, welcome wherever you're listening to Comms Day Live. This is the second in our short series celebrating the 30th anniversary of Communications Day. I'm Tim Marshall. I'm a former Comms Day editor and now a communications and corporate affairs consultant. I'm with Graeme Lynch, Comms Day founder and publisher. Welcome, Graeme. Thank you.

In our first episode, we had a great look back at the early days of Comms Day, how how it came about and the events that made it what it is today, genuinely, in my opinion, a publishing success story and something that you can be very proud of, Graham, and is serving an important function in the sector. We also looked at some of the big drivers of change in the telecommunications sector that have existed over the many years, whether that's technology, government or investors.

What I'd like to do now, and perhaps we can spend this episode talking about is to reflect on some of the big themes of the last 30 years, the first 30 years of comms day, the things that really stand out as big events or influences, whether that's technology shifts, policy responses, big bets, failures, they could be fun, and successes.

And it'll be great to get some of your personal insights, Graham, as an observer of the industry over that time and a reflection on just perhaps how heated some of those big moments have been. I suppose if we're taking the 30,000 feet view above Australia, really the big industry battleground of the last 30 years has been the evolution of Telstra, the fixed infrastructure to support universal high-speed broadband, and of course, the NBN. Yes, we're still talking about NBN.

These really at times seemed like battles to define what exactly was in the national interest.

My god there were books written for goodness sake there were eras in that journey the protracted sale and non-separation of Telstra the unbundled local loop years we spoke about this in the previous episode Telstra's commercial framing and the competitive agitation and advocacy that ultimately led to the NBN and of course the eras of NBN construction and technology shifts ultimately bringing us to recent times with millions of people on balance,

effectively working from home and running their businesses and whatever else they need to do from a reliable service. There's a lot there. What are your reflections on that journey, Graeme? Were you sometimes surprised at the twists and turns that were taken to get us where we are now? Yeah, I mean, a lot of, I mean, that's a very, like, brawling, encompassing and terrific frame there, Tim, of all the different things that have happened.

And what's surprising about a lot of those things was how random some of them were. You know, so if you go right back to the start, you know, if you go back to, I guess, the end of the 80s, the whole idea was that you would create network competition to what was then Telecom Australia and personified in the form of Optus, the second network, and Photophone, the third mobile network. work.

And of course, when comms day started, I think one of our first stories was actually Telstra tendering for what became its cable network. So that was all the go. And of course, some people will say that competition ended in terms of that original intention when Paul Keating basically said he wasn't going to let Kerry Packer and Optus control the cable TV industry and gave the green light to Telstra to follow them down streets.

And that was sort of the point where an incumbent flexes muscle and stymies a competitor. Some people will say that was a seminal moment. And of course, that wasn't driven by cost-benefit analyses or anything. That was just basically a visceral dislike of Kerry Packer that drove the political reasoning there.

And then, of course, probably the next big change was, you know, you get to the early 2000s and, you know, clearly network competition wasn't putting the constraints on Telstra that was hoped for it. And the ACCC made a decision to basically price access to Telstra network assets in the form of unbundled local loop or spectrum sharing. People also argue about this. I would argue that they underpriced it relative to the cost of replacement.

And Henry Ergas, perhaps, he actually wrote a book about this, funnily enough.

Kind of made an argument that they were using a kind of forward tilted annuity model which basically meant that the prices were underpriced initially and then would rise you know over a 10 20 year period the argument being that were people still going to be using copper in 20 or 30 years you know was it reasonable to say that tilster can recover those costs over that time frame because that implied there would be no upgrade of the technology so so that was a very technical equal,

obscure decision made by a regulatory agency that, of course, spurred a whole lot of competitive activity with the D-SLAMs. Now of course, another arbitrary regulatory decision there was to ban that access. So you had Ban 1 and Ban 2, which was the cities, Ban 3, which was the regions, and Ban 4 was remote, and they were all priced differently. So Ban 1 and Ban 2 in the cities was quite cheap. Got down to as low as $12 a month for unbundled local loop in the metro areas.

And then band three was priced a bit higher. From memory, it was in the 20s, high 20s. And then, but band four was like in the hundreds. So basically you were saying, we're not going to do anything to facilitate network competition outside of the cities, which created a two-tier outcome. So these are really technical regulatory decisions, not very well understood. That had profound impacts on where services were being delivered.

Indeed, they became embedded in the business model of every player in the market. If I'm right, in the enterprise services, I'm looking at carrier internet for big business, it wasn't until only around five years ago that those banded pricing tiers came out of the market. Yeah, that's right. They're for a regulatory purpose or a reason. They just were industry standard.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And they were originally there, they were created ostensibly as a justification to provide underpriced access to cities for competitors, you know, as to determine a market outcome, in other words. That sort of sucked if you were in the regions. And then if you go forward, I mean, I'm skirting a lot of context and history here, and there will be informed listeners who will recoil in horror at how I'm generalizing here.

Well, perhaps, but we are just interested in, you know, I guess the twists and turns. Yeah, well, I'll fast forward. And another thing that can't be underestimated was the impact of the Americans who ran Telstra through the sort of onwards from 2005-ish, which was partly a response to all this. You know, the perception that the competitors were kind of potentially going to carve up Telstra. They're bringing in some aggressive American carrier execs in the form of Sol Trujillo and Phil Burgess.

You know, these guys, you know, they came from US West, you know, one of the baby bells I was talking about in the first part of this, first episode of this podcast series. You know, they had an aggressive approach to regulation.

Population and you know that what happened during that period still profoundly echoes today in terms of what happened with the nbn and and but what particularly they their resistance to this unbundled local loop regime was to say well we want to upgrade our network to fiber to the node. But we need to be able to charge substantially higher wholesale prices to recover our investment. And we want a bit of government help as well.

We want government to kick in. I think from memory, it was about $4 or $5 billion, and that will help us take it out across regional Australia to about 75%, I think, from memory of the country. So, that's sort of obviously a bit less than what NBN ended up doing, which was 90%, but still a fair degree of that tail would have been probably uneconomic without that government help.

Now, they advanced that proposal far enough that they got into talks with the ACCC about how this was going to be priced. And those talks only failed because the ACCC and Telstra had a fundamental disagreement on kind of how rural fiber-to-the-node installations should be cross-subsidized within the tariff. So, Till Stewart was saying, we think it needs about a $6 a month tariff. So, in other words, a $6 a month impost on the charge to cross-subsidize our

loss-making country operations. And the ACCC said this is too much. I think from memory they said it should be $3 or something. And they reached a point of intransigence on that. And that caused the end of the talks and the collapse of the proposal and then everything else's history. The government decided to build an NBN and nationalize that fixed network. Compensate, I would argue, overcompensate Telstra for the privilege. Telstra.

Ended up firing all their management and their chairman and replacing them with David Thode. I mean, it had profound – that particular day, whatever day that was, when I think it was Phil Burgess and Tony Warren walked out of a meeting with the ACCC, the echoes of what happened from that meeting were profound.

And it all swung on that. that which if you think about it in retrospect it's kind of incredible that there wasn't some kind of intervention to say come on guys you're actually not that far apart and the irony of it all is it was it was over three dollars rural subsidy the irony of it is that when the mbn got created they came up with a thing called the regional broadband scheme to duplicate that levy that the a triple c said was too much guess what

it is it's seven dollars a month per line it's actually more than what Telstra was ought to be. So the whole thing collapsed over ACCC to opposition to a levy, which they ended up introducing anyway to facilitate the same result. Well, I think you might say that an attempt at that mediation was the original, I think it was called a request for proposals under the original NBN concept, which was actually still a fiber to the node.

But Telstra dealt themselves out with an 11 or a 13 page proposal which didn't include the right legal clauses. Well, yeah, let's drill down on what actually happened there. So this is after what I'm describing with the meeting collapsing. So then Stephen Conroy, who is the communications minister, we should declare here that you worked for him. I did indeed work for Senator Stephen Conroy at a certain part of my life. Yep. So you can probably inform anything I'm about to say about this.

But, of course, what then happened was he basically decided to tender the upgrade to Warcomers, whether that was...

Legally possible with a privatized asset you know was always a little unclear but he did that anyway and of course you know Optus put together the G7 and there was Terrier you might remember from Canada oh no no Axia Axia was from Canada all these people put bids in and of course the Telstra bid was judged to be non-compliant because it was actually they forgot to include a statement of what they would be doing to support Australia's SME sector in

terms of local supply arrangements right they just simply forgot to mention it so the bid was ruled non-compliant this is muddied by the fact that at various points Senator Conroy or Minister Conroy has said that he would accept non-compliant bids anyway like it was all very very unclear because Because the whole thing collapsed and then it was pulled out of the fire by this idea that government could set up the NBN itself.

And away things went. It's a very purely Australian journey of market liberalisation and market structure. You won't find another equivalent. I remember through the years we would look at things like open reach in the UK and you'd look at the way the Germans were doing things. And taking aside the idea that there might be a central investment in a large fixed infrastructure, the whole journey and the twists and turns is uniquely Australia.

I guess reflecting on how that is relevant for comms day and surviving for 30 years or thriving for 30 years as a news publication, that's some good fodder, Graeme.

That's one way of looking at it. I mean, at times it was incredibly frustrating because it was a, you know, there's always a problem when you're running an industry newsletter, you have to balance revelation with access. And what I mean by that is you can't run really, really intensive campaigns against specific stakeholders because they'll just stop talking to you.

You've got to keep people talking, and you have to be conscious of sensitivity and feelings, which means sometimes you do pull your punches at times when some of your readership want you to land a punch, but others don't. You have to make judgments. You know, you can't be all things to all people. And that was probably the trickiest period of comms day from the point of view of how do you bum its coverage? fridge. So, I mean, I had some strong opinions on that.

I actually, a lot of people forget this, but I tended not to air them through the pages of comms day. I would do it separately. I would do it in other fora. Yeah, a lot of people sort of, some people have this view that comms day was a bit anti-NBN. But actually, if you read the pages of comms day from that period, it was just basic reporting.

And a lot of my opinions were kept separate and were aired in other places like Whirlpool or on blogs, that kind of thing, and not actually in the pages of comms day itself.

Yeah, that's interesting. Because if I reflect back, I mean, there really was a long running and quite vicious advocacy guerrilla war occurring right through the sector. You had loud voices on both sides or from multiple positions once. And ultimately, you ended up with the outcome, I suppose, which landed on the side as a victory victory for the competitive sector. Is that how you saw it? Because, you know, I've got to hand it to what was then the Competitive Carriers Coalition.

It was largely David Foreman, who was associated with Macquarie Telecom at various stages, and Matt Healy was another one who now works in the minister's office. And they created this, whether they were valid or not is beside the point. They created this amazing sense of crisis and industry insurgency against the Telstra monopoly. Some of it correct, some of it not correct.

But they created this amazing sort of siege-type environment, even as these competitive carriers they were representing were getting quite substantial market share gains and building personal fortunes, as it turned out. Not sure where the chicken or the egg comes in there. Did the advocacy help or who knows? But they did a fantastic job in making it look like there was a big problem to be solved.

Now, the eventual solution, which was the NBN, probably wasn't quite what they were after, a fiber to the premises NBN.

End but there's certainly no doubting the role they played in creating that tempestuous atmosphere which enabled an extreme political solution like the nbn to manifest and the way it did there certainly a led to b yeah well in my view always the the technology was a secondary to the structural change that was being put in place and i think from my observation back, I think there was universal surprise across the sector, no matter which side

of the arguments you'd been on, at the magnitude of the call that had been made to put that in place with the NBN reform. Yeah, I mean, I remember when the story of it first broke. I'm not talking about NBN Mark 1, you know, the FGTN tender. I'm talking about NBN Mark 2, which was, you know, Kevin Rudd and Conroy on the aircraft deciding a new direction. Just to be there, there was more than a napkin. Oh, yeah. I'm sure there was a moleskin notebook.

I'm sure it was more salubrious than a napkin. But, of course, the idea had gestation before that, but the fact is that the idea was consummated in that environment, which was obviously all part of the folklore around it. It is folklore, that's right. But... If you look at that extreme, I mean, I still see it as a very extreme response to a problem, but it was not, and it was a surprising one. I mean, you're absolutely correct when you say it was surprising.

But if you look back at it, the fact that there was this sort of sense of crisis permeating Australian telecoms at the time, it had a sort of internal logic to it at the time. Absolutely. And if you combine that with the arrival and the presence of these very charismatic American executives at Telstra and the incumbents, you've kind of had this perfect storm for our industry, our sector, that issue of competitive fixed line telecommunications being leading news.

Yeah. I mean, it was a lot of people forget this. It was the dominant political story. I mean, and I'm not aware of anywhere else in the world where telecommunications was ever a front page political story. I mean, I'm staying corrected if there was a place, but it was really weird in the sense of the global telecom sector. I mean, a lot of, as you might expect, I talked to a lot of overseas telecom people and they were just perplexed and baffled by what was going on here.

I would love to be able to build the hours of personal explanation I gave to international telecom execs about this. I'd love to be able to bill it to someone because I spent so much time explaining it. Well, that's right. I spent my time in multinationals after my time in government. And believe me, and we were supplying into that market. Believe me, there was plenty of time briefing international executives on the obscure facts.

There's no doubt about there's no doubt about that but i think that you know well to tie that up i mean, And for many years and right back, this does go back into the 90s and the sale, the long pale sale of Telstra, this notion that Telstra shareholders were actually a political bloc in their own right was seen to really have currency. The whole immune issue was interesting because it spoke to a lot of different impulses in people.

And for the people who became kind of religiously pro-fiber, it was all encapsulated in their their view of, does our country have an economic future? Is it relevant? We don't want to be seen as the country of fossil fuel exports. We want to become sophisticated. It was seen as a marker of that. So it sort of played into that. And then there was also still, this can't be underestimated. We'd had a few years of budget surpluses under the Howard government and the debt had been paid off.

And back then in conservative politics, unlike now, there was a real, you've got to balance the budget. You've got to be very careful with public expenditure. Don't bet on things that are risky. And there was a lot of that impulse that drove skepticism as well about the NBN.

So there were all these different things coming into play, all sorts of different issues and people coming at it from all sorts of different angles, which is what made it very interesting thing at the time yes no no no doubt it was it was fascinating and somewhat somewhat crazy and you do mention that that vision piece around the technology and i do i do kind of want to go there yeah sure another and another front in the

war that that battle for the technology impurity versus pragmatism if you want to yeah that's a good way of putting it it's purity versus pragmatism yeah yeah that came after the decisions were made you know it was always i always found it a curious fight.

My view is that has always been that NBN was a stubbornly and belligerently purist vision when it came to the TET. And my view has been that it would never have got off the ground without that absolute commitment.

Yeah, sure, sure, sure. But I also believe in the early years that stubborn purity put the project actually at risk, that having some flexibility to innovate in that time would have helped speed delivery and reinforce NBN against some of its existential threats that were pretty real for a little while there. But here we are, it's still there.

And I do recall in 2020, there was going to be, and for, I guess, full disclosure, I was working for NBN at this time in the comms term, there was going to be a huge celebration about network completion. This was the plan for the PR. It made complete sense. That's where we'd been headed for all those years.

But you know what? That got sidelined and put to the side because the story had actually become the success of nbn in supporting everyone through the covid lockdown yeah there was a question mark there in january february 2020 of what would need to be done and whether it would stand up it turned out it did it delivered and now pragmatic fiber upgrades are well in well underway that was that was my view and we know there was all sorts of commentary through the years as the technology evolve.

All right. Let me ask you, Graeme, on the subject of technology. I know I'm not going to ask you to choose fiber or copper. Is it religion? And why is it so? Well, it is religion if you don't, if you just say we should have X and you don't think about the logistics of completing X. And I think the issue I had with NBN, let's call it Mark II, so the 2009 onwards NBN, the issue I had with it was that it was a complete startup of $0 revenues from day one.

You effectively were creating, recreating something that had taken the previous incumbent Telstra decades of all that institutional knowledge and ways of doing things and so on. You were creating something from scratch but then because you were creating something from scratch having to lease out immense amount of assets from the incumbent that you're replacing to make it so.

What where was the cost reform like you're compensating Telstra of billions and billions and billions allegedly to achieve a better outcome okay the problem of course with facilitating a startup in the way you know literally I think Mike Quigley was employee number one and you know literally was a desk in an empty office on day one kind of thing. That's so true.

Yeah. The problem with that was you had enormous scale up time, which manifested in the fact that three is on, there was still barely any connections, which, which was inevitable in hindsight, that, those original targets were always too ambitious because it's hard to do startups at scale. Extraordinary ambition. Yeah, extraordinary ambition, which would be my core criticism. So it wasn't just the pure fiber vision. It was the whole thing around it.

Oh, that's easy. We can just create this from scratch and da-da-da. And the simple fact that the civil works involved in... Okay, so just to come back on that. We could have had a fiber-to-the-node upgrade as early as 2005 if things had worked differently with those Telstra things. If. Yeah, if. We could have, right? So we'd lost five years. And this is the context of the critique of the pure fiber vision of the NBN. We kind of lost five years. So you had to make up that lost time quickly.

And this is something I wouldn't, you know, people think I was very skeptical of broadband. band. Not when it came from the jump from dial-up to 10, 20 megabit broadband, but every empirical study that's been done on this shows that going from dial-up to that kind of 20 meg, mark is profound in terms of the economic impact it makes. It gets you onto streaming video, gets you into cloud, it gets you into all these wonderful things that you could never have done on ISGN or dial-up,

right? So absolutely no denying that. But Australia was behind the eight ball at that point. You know, ADSL 2 plus was a very discriminatory technology because heaps of people were at the ends of long lines and unable to get more than single digit megabits.

Something had to be done about that. So the problem I had with the NBN, you know, Mike Quigley starting with one desk in an empty office and having to lease out assets and build up an entire national infrastructure and then use the most difficult of all the technologies to implement because it requires all that civil work, some digging through gardens and so on. The problem I had with that was we're already five years behind and there were

elements of that construct that would just simply contribute to delays. Now... You know, when we went into the 2013 election, which Tony Abbott won, NBN was already 90% behind on all of its revenue and rollout targets. And that was kind of early in the piece when those targets were still very modest. So there were specific reasons for that, which actually had nothing to do with the choice of technology in itself, too.

They were all about management strategies. Now, one thing the NBN management got really badly wrong in those first few years was that it was actually very self-conscious about the cost of fiber to the premises. So, it tried really hard to bargain those contractors down to absolute minimum price. Now, so you had a situation heading into the 2013 election where the contractors were basically down in tools or financially unable to do work at the prices they were being offered.

So, NBN management at the time would defend that by saying, well, we're looking after the public purse. We're defending the public interest in terms of keeping costs down. This is a good thing, maintaining discipline on the contractors. But, of course, by transferring all that risk to contractors who were unable to assume that risk, he simply pushed all the risk back onto NBN and the taxpayer who weren't getting what they were paying for, which was a network. work, right?

So it was just one of those things where. It's all very easy to criticize these things in hindsight, I understand as well. But to be fair, there were some of us who were saying at the time, you haven't thought about the unintended consequences of the decisions that you've made, and they were going to contribute to delays. Now, People will still think that's a Luddite view. You should have just persevered and gone on with it.

But the fact is that when they reverted to the multi-technology mix, decided to use HFC, decided to use Fiber to the Node. You had some weeks where Bill Morrow was releasing 100,000 premises to the market in one week because of those Node upgrades, which went a long way to solving that original 2005 problem.

Right of slow broadband and with hfc look it had a problem you know there was the big hfc pause obviously back in whatever year that was to 2016 or 2017 you know which delayed that rollout but but at the same time to be fair to malcolm turnbull he delivered all the fiber to the premises. Houses which were in the original design they all got built they weren't relegated back to node if If it was already in the production line, Turnbull got in and finished them.

And so we ended up with, I think it was one and a half million fiber to the prim lines as well. Sounds about right.

There's no question that that fiber vision was a genuine and I think vital part of the shock and awe to get through just a step, well, a change in position of the structure of the market, which had been functioning as we've just been discussing a little while ago.

Go in a crazy fashion for too long, as you say, we were five years behind and that structural change needed to come in, but certainly there were virtues to the flexibility, but then it became this talisman within a political context for critiquing either side of the argument, either five or four, as you mentioned it, a Luddite on the other side. Side, I always would reflect, I mean.

There's a story that the speed obsession that was occurring in markets at that time goes back to some, I think it was mid-2000s, European Commission targets of one gigabyte per second. I'm not sure what year. But there was a point where two things happened. Carriers in Europe ran out of money because of the GFC. Yeah. And the vendors realized that they'd be much better served selling progressive upgrades rather than a single massive upgrade to fiber on the existing network.

Suddenly, 100 megabytes per second by 2020 became the mantra. There was a point there where you wonder, who do you trust? Yeah, that's a really good point. And you mentioned this before, which was that Australia had its own idiosyncratic path here. Other countries were still relying mainly on private investment, which means it was more success-based and more empirical-based.

Other countries had targets, but it wasn't actually government business enterprises with unlimited government capital delivering those targets. So, there were market constraints on government ambitions in other countries. You know, and I think that was pretty obvious in the 20-teens, if you like, 2015, 2016, around that period, when you had a lot of other markets like the UK and Germany and Japan and so on were pursuing multi-technology mixed-type approaches to get broadband out to the market.

And that has changed somewhat in recent years, and they've been more inclined to pursue a fibre-only approach. There's absolutely no doubt about that. That was, we're still five years behind, arguably, just by everything that's happened. You know, it's a good point. I mean, I'll go back to what I said before, which is the profound uplift in productivity and capability comes when you go from dial-up to that 25 to 50 meg mark.

There's a lot of empirical studies which show that. There are actually surprisingly few empirical studies which show a great benefit in the jump to 100 to 1,000. There's very little evidence for it. There's a couple of dodgy studies commissioned by the people who set the targets. In the EU that would say otherwise, but they don't withstand a lot of scrutiny. And the reality is, is that in Australia right now, a lot of people can get 100 megs, most people.

Nearly all people actually can get 100 megs. A lot of people can get a gig or something on the way to a gig, whether it be 250, 500, whatever. But the market continues to speak. We've got 48% of people on 50 megs, another 21, 22, still on 25 megs, and only about 21% on 100 megs or more. Even though...

Between NBN in terms of its SAU and its product and marketing people and the government, everything has been done to raise the prices of the lower speed plans to reduce the prices of the high speed plans. But the fact is that the Australian consumer, and this isn't Graham Lynch speaking, it's not an ideologue speaking, it's just the market speaking, that very few people seem to be justifying that extra $5, $10, $15 to go to the higher speeds.

Even in a context where we had COVID and work from home and I can't think of a better driver for people to get high-speed broadband at home than COVID and being made to do all your spreadsheets and your video calls from home. But it still hasn't really touched the sides. And ditto for the fact I just did this calculation only yesterday, less than 70% of Australian premises are still connected to the NBN.

So there's 30% of of premises and you know it counts when it's in the reality that some of those are uninhabited right but 30 or a large subset of 30 don't even see a need for it and so i sort of feel has the big nbn experiment been worth it you know it's a it's an open question in the light of that kind of data. Yeah. Well, for me, and I'm no economist and far from it, but the reform actually wasn't about the speed. It was around universal wholesale layer broadband.

The original vision, you may say from a political point of view, required some kind of cut through when it It came to a target. What was used was that technology. I think that did create a compelling message to the country, but then perhaps what.

Could have been tempered or in fact through politics was tempered and flexibility was allowed in the way that the network ultimately rolled forward but that structural that structural by product still still exists today as does some of the vitriol on fiber to the planet and purity which you can see in social media comments even today that's a topic really worth just just i want to make a couple of comments on that has

the nbn been worth it from the point of view of facilitating a level playing field for wholesale? It's a really, really good question and a good observation. And on one level, I'd say you're absolutely correct. Because if you look at, go back to 20 years to the URL era, Telstra's market share was still around 80% in fixed telecommunications. And if you look at the latest NBN figures, literally, that are just out a few days ago, that's fallen below 40% in NBN resale for the first time.

And you actually the fastest growing category of nbn resellers of the smaller people like superloop and aussie broadband and those challenger telcos below the big four so you can definitely make an argument that it's been fantastic for reducing tilstra's market share and facilitating the market share competitors i'm wholly on board with that with a couple of reservations one is that the price of that is that nbn still has to pay anywhere between

a billion and two billion dollars a year to telstra in using all its assets which is just free money but for telstra so has there been a commensurate consumer benefit to the tune of one to two billion dollars from that market share shift that's i'm not saying there isn't one but it's not quantified right the the second point i would make is that if you look at the price and user prices for NBN, they're actually going up CPI, above CPI for the first time in the history of Australian broadband.

And this is ostensibly to help pay for the fibre upgrades, right? So has that been a great outcome? You know, these are open questions. I'm not saying I have a definitive answer on them. I was saying that no one's even really asking those questions in the Australian political class, partly because so much about the NBN was defined by the now opposition. They particularly want to indulge in a big criticism of it. So there's actually hardly any questions asked about any of these things. Yeah.

Would we even agree on the metrics being measured if those questions were being asked? How do you evaluate competitive benefit and cost benefit and all that kind of stuff? Getting everyone who's been part of this debate to agree on any of those frameworks, I extremely doubt would happen. I think you're right. Well, if there was a market of buyers, we could write a book on this, Graeme.

Perhaps yeah but i'm not i'm not sure we might need to get some feedback from your readers on whether a book might be might be worth worthwhile you're listening to the views of graham lynch publisher and founder of communications day as we run this short series on the 30th anniversary of communications day my name's tim marshall we've just been covering the nbn my goodness that is certainly a unique marker, a crazy time in the sector.

I've got to move this on. I think Graeme will be there for a whole series. It's certainly a defining theme, but there's some other major themes and maybe they emphasise the international nature of the sector and perhaps more of what's going to come in the years to come. Firstly, I want to look at mobile and we've mentioned this a bit through our conversations on this episode and last, podcast.

I'm keen to look at this because I think it's one of the foundational stories of the last 30 years, informing so much about the competitive landscape and consumer preferences, influence of innovation and disruptors. It's also where the industry might have actually contributed to such visual, visible social change.

If you think about new banking models in the third world, which were an early example of cheap phones getting out and about to the way people work and spend their time and communicate with those closest to them. But I'm curious about the role of mobile in bringing competition, maybe changing the mindset of markets where, as we talked about before, there'd been a glacial pace of change, reforming the fixed line, but the competitive market for mobile was pretty dynamic from get-go.

What were your reflections on the mobile market in those early days, Graham? Oh, it was absolutely the font of where competition was. Again, because the civil, as you just alluded to, and as we were just talking about with the NBN, the cost and more to the point, the timeline it takes to do the civil works to replicate a fixed network are ridiculously long. Whereas with the mobile network, it could be up and running pretty quickly.

In some of the smaller markets like Singapore, literally within 12 months, you've had new networks up and running. David Teo to us is a good example there. So absolutely important in facilitating competition because you avoid that need for civil works. As we talked about in the last episode, Tim, you had a beautifully standardized ecosystem and technology in the form of GSM, which was literally buy-off-the-shelf plug-in and play.

As a network technology, there's very, very little customization required required to get a GSM network up and running. Obviously, you needed the spectrum regulators to enable this. But to be fair, government policymakers in the early 1990s saw the opportunity here. It wasn't completely altruistic. They saw the opportunity to auction off the spectrum as a great revenue source. And that was a lot of the driver facilitating competition in mobile. It was beautiful.

Treasuries loved it, didn't they? That late 90s period running up, I think it was the sale of the 3G spectrum, was a massive operation. And of course, you can't have a discussion about the development of mobile, about the aid and abetance of government regulators in always magically finding new spectrum bands to sell. Hand in hand with the vendors who are always creating new technology generations that can use these spectrum bands. hands.

So hence the very rapid move from 1G to now 6G, you know, that we're talking about now. That's all been hand in hand between government and vendors in the industry. So it's absolutely, mobile, absolutely important, not just competition, but also the penetration of telecommunications, obviously in the developing world, you know, mobile made communications a bit cautious.

I had a real, it's funny, we were just talking at great length about the NBN, end because even though I might have had contrarian views on it, it certainly populated my mind for quite a few years. And I had a very good kind of revelatory moment about 10 years ago when I was at the Pacific Telecommunications Council's annual conference in Hawaii, and I was doing some onstage moderation. And one of my jobs was to interview Kara Swisher, who's one of America's top tech journalists.

And she was running the Wall Street Journal's tech section for many years, and she's done all manner of things. She's just published an autobiography, which I think was one of the top-selling books in America last month. And, you know, she's a star. Her big claim to fame is she's got all the CEO, Elon Musk, and all those people on autodial.

She's very, very well networked. And I asked her about, this was around the time of the NBN wars, and I was asking her about these sorts of issues and how a lot of governments were embracing NBN type models like Singapore and Malaysia, other examples.

Examples or there were policies to develop gigabit fixed capability in Europe as you mentioned before I asked her about all that and she just looked at me like I just arrived from Mars like what on earth are you talking about this is so irrelevant to the state of world communications it's all about mobile mobile is where everything exciting is happening it's where the apps have been developed it's where you actually have technology making

a real difference to people's lives to economies to societies, it's shaping media, it's da-da-da-da-da, and you just want to talk about the difference between fiber to the node and fiber to the premises? What type of fool are you? And I got put in my place for raising it as a question. Kara Swisher is a very stern woman. Well, you could have come back with an engineer's answer that there was no mobile without fix.

I was in front of 900 people who were on her side, so I thought, I'll change the subject, actually, is how I dealt with that. Shiny things but it was a really it was a good reality check because that is the truth if you want to talk about this in international terms mobile is mobile is actually everything, Like it actually is the story and it's a story of competition. It's a story of relevance. It's a story about where innovation is, all those things.

Probably for the vendors, it's a story of where their profit is too, if truth be known. You were talking in the last episode about, you know, that moment, obviously there was the iPhone in 2007. And just before that, there were a couple of other versions. There was a Nokia communicator, BlackBerry. BlackBerry was a thing. Yeah, I forgot that BlackBerry was a big one. BlackBerry was a thing, which brought together mobile and the internet, primitive obviously in today's terms.

But I was chatting to a friend the other day and we were talking about being part of this generation that straddles the internet. We've lived without it and we now live today and we'll try to work out where the critical date was where it became real and part of our lives. And it ended up being 2007 with iPhone, the apps, effectively new category of media there. It seems like everything before that was just tinkering really and experimenting, getting things up, including the whole dot-com boom.

Quite frankly, by and large, and all the different business models that were being tested with very little audience to buy buying to them. I guess reflecting on that interview with the leading journalist that you were just talking about, I guess that plays to that kind of notion. This is where the hype is. What do you think about the legacy of the iPhone? How has it changed the way the industry operates?

Oh, it definitely moved capital at all without wanting to sound too sort of you know, hyping it up too much. It profoundly changed how people used telecommunications, how the centrality of it as a device in people's lives, you know, for messaging, for running their lives, you know, all the banking apps and all that kind of stuff. You know, it profoundly transformed our day-to-day lived experiences. But the iPhone was half of the story because the iPhone is a Western world thing.

Yeah. It's beyond the financial reach of people in a lot of the world. But what the Google Android system did was, as I said before, what Windows did to the Apple system. Well, Apple set the standard and then. And Android emulated that. Chinese production as well. Yeah, and Android emulated that. So in a sense, it's the iPhone. It's a story of the iPhone and Android, I'd say. The two go hand in hand together.

But I totally agree with you that that. If you want to pick a year, you know, a lot of people like to say that in rock music, 1967 was the key year, right? You're into the communications, 2007. You can make a better argument for 2007 than any other year. Absolutely. It's like the year, the moment it went from we're building things because we're engineers to consumers having an expectation of the way they wanted to live their life and therefore businesses adjusting to meet that need.

Yeah, and it's kind of funny because you see this a lot in the web world. You know, most digital media companies have a director of CX, you know, customer experience, which is all about the design of a website and how people interact with it and the interface and, you know, all the psychology and the design logic and all the things behind it. In a sense, it was the iPhone that kicked all that off. Before then, it was text and SMS was originally an engineer's tool.

So the guys building the towers could check they were working or something similar to that. Yeah, and it was seen at best as a way to do emergency broadcast. Like your network's been down for 10 hours, it's now officially back up. It's a text message to make it official.

That was how it was originally viewed, yeah. Well, there's so much critical activity now happening online and on mobile, and there's a lot that can go wrong, as we've seen and I'm sure we'll see again with outages and breaches and the like, back in the day, networks were pretty solid state, but now, you know, obviously far more software-based.

I feel like over the years, and I'm talking that's a 30-year timeframe we're kind of talking about here, there might have been a slide over time where resilience got a bit to the side to an extent as the sector grew so rapidly. I don't think that's the case now. Now, I think it's totally back in the frame. The solutions might not be there yet, but it's definitely part of the framework, as it has to be. How have you seen the approach to resilience change over time?

I guess I'm talking about mobile here specifically, but it can be broader as well. It's still a work in progress. I think we're at the early stages of a policy debate in Australia about it. And what I mean by that is, what's the cost-benefit trade-off? You know, like how much extra are we prepared to invest? It's like anything. It's like life insurance. You know, what's the value you put on that 0.95 to 99 type area, you know, if you like about time?

What premium are you prepared to pay in terms of your investment or price or socialized cost to get in there? So, you know, we've seen the federal government right now, Michelle Rowland, you know, does have some budget for resilience measures. It's in the tens of millions of dollars. And I suspect... Only makes the slightest dent on what might be needed.

And then it feeds all back, and this is something we haven't really talked about, into that whole notion of, is telecommunications critical infrastructure? Is it essential infrastructure? And there's actually, like, they sound like interchangeable words, but they're not necessarily interchangeable. You know, we've just been talking about competition. You know, you've got three mobile networks.

What premium should you place on resilience obligations for each one, when the odds are that if one goes down, the other two will still be up? Can you resolve that through things like temporary disaster roaming, for example? Can you have cheaper solutions to that resilience issue? I suspect it's a challenge because, well, we know it's a challenge, but I think consumers have a pretty high expectation of what the level of criticality of these networks should be.

And I suspect, interestingly, that they would believe that their mobile service is of more critical importance than their fixed net. Oh, you're 110% right there. I think there's a much greater tolerance for failure in the fixed network than for the mobile network. And exhibit A of that is the immense reputational damage that Optus suffered when it had its outage that from memory went down at about 5 a.m. Was largely restored by 1pm. But that had a cataclysmic effect on that company.

We still haven't even seen all the consequences from that. We still haven't seen the consequences from the data breach from a year earlier. That's still working its way through the courts. We don't know what fines they might face. These are all new test cases for the law. So we don't even know what future damages officers are going to suffer.

I'm curious to think whether there, we were reflecting in the last episode about how technology innovation comes and whether it's a step change or a radical difference and how it directs markets, you know. Yeah. Is this a space for technology innovation around the critical resilience of network? I think one thing that happened for sure, and it's interesting it happened to the same company, but you had two specific issues. Obviously, you had the data breach in 2022.

And from what we can see, that was poor security policy around a backup API system, right, from what we know now. And then the network outage the doctors experienced last year appears to be because someone put the routers on set and forget. get. I didn't realise that you've actually got to adjust the parameters based on day-to-day traffic changes.

So I think what you will you know, you don't need a government regulator to tell a telco that these are two observable instances of avoidable problems that you don't have to meet the same fate if you up your vigilance on what you're doing with your network. And I think I think there has been a bit of set and forget, and I think that's the change that you're going to see. And of course, there's no shortage of security vendors encouraging telcos to up their game in this area.

Well, that's right. And the government policy may help focus the attention as well. Yeah. But they're a good example. Oh, obviously, if there's a big stiff fine at the end of something, that's a great way to change behaviour. Absolutely. But this is the issue I see. In both instances, they were like really random, avoidable mistakes. They didn't go fundamentally to flaws in the technology. They weren't unreliable technologies, really.

They were technologies that weren't being properly administered. That's a different thing. Yeah. Fascinating. So let's take a bit of a look at geopolitics.

This is good stuff. tough 30 30 years ago we were reporting on nation-state carriers and there was some international equivalents let's change quite a bit and in a moment we'll have a chat about global big tech and over the top players but first i think it's been a fascinating last 10 years with governments taking a far greater interest in telco than perhaps the previous 20 or perhaps a different flavour of interest, if I can put it that way, particularly through China's rise and realisations

around national security, frankly. It's interesting to me that telcos were always traditional state infrastructure and very much built to support national security and outreach internationally. Again, when we were talking about resilience there, it seemed maybe this notion waned somewhat as markets opened up. But more recently, there's a sense of Western nations playing catch up. I guess it really began with the long project to remove Huawei and ZTE from Western markets.

How have you seen that dynamic playing out? Well, it's interesting because, first of all, I've got to put a caveat on everything I'm about to say, which is the sky has not fallen in.

That's true people like me might have predicted it was going to fall in a few years ago and that clearly hasn't happened but you know you have you have a situation where removing china china became dominant in the manufacturer ecosystem or at least became a significant player in terms of determining the price of its competitors if nothing else it became Companies like Huawei were the difference between survival or otherwise for smaller telcos,

like number three, number four mobile operators in markets. It was the only way they could stay on a level playing field with the incumbents was to get this cheaper gear. And often it wasn't just cheaper in terms of price. It was more often about more favorable credit terms. You don't have to pay for this for 18 months. It was a business model around.

Yeah. And the fact that sometime, like Huawei in particular, had a really interesting model in Southeast Asia of swarming the telco with a whole bunch of engineers from China on short-term visas to get things ramped up pretty quickly. Whereas a European vendor might have taken a bit longer to achieve the same outcome. So there was often a speed-to-market advantage in using a Chinese vendor as well. So you take all that out of the system, it's clearly got issues for industry sustainability.

And the obvious one is in the mobile sector. We basically created an Ericsson-Nokia duopoly in terms of mobile network supply. You're also seeing it in submarine cables as well. well, you know, if you exclude the China supplier, there's effectively only three vendors left building submarine cables, and one of them, Subcom, pretty much is spending all its time building Google cables now. They don't really have the capacity to build for many other people.

So you could argue that if you're not in the Google cable ecosystem, you've actually got a choice of only two suppliers in submarine cables, one of which just got nationalized by the French government last week. So, Agri-Tel Submarine Networks. So, yeah, you've got supply chains in telco now that are pretty thin. You know, if you were worried about sustainability, or more prosaically, how important are you to a vendor that's handling half the world's business?

Well, I guess- You don't want to be on the dag end of their customer list, do you? Maybe. Maybe not. And I guess it's another, to an extent, it's another example of, we've talked before about where telcos aren't necessarily masters of their own destiny. What do you think are the significant forces at play here? What are the higher level forces that are causing this, certain players to be removed or players from different nations and then this concentration?

Oh, look, I think it genuinely does come from intelligence agencies fearing... You know, I mean, the extreme example that came up with the Huawei ban in Australia, you know, and what the signals directorate was telling the prime minister at the time, was that you've got to be fearful of a kill switch. You know, they can switch this thing off. Now, whether that's right or wrong is beside the point. That's the advice intelligence agencies were giving prime ministers.

Now, was there a hidden agenda of economic protectionism in that? You know, we want to halt the rise of China. I'm not sure. In fact, based on the kind of type of advice that was being given, I think it was more directly a, we're worried about something we don't understand, so it's better to avoid it. I think it was coming more from that impetus. My feel that this rebuild of Western capability is actually a byproduct of it. Yeah.

In other words, I don't think the West is smart enough to be that strategic, in other words, because we generally, as a civilization, have not been particularly strategic in anything we've done in the last half century. So, I don't think this is evidence of great change. I think the economic protectionism thing I don't particularly buy because, you know, this has been driven out of North America. What are the benefits to North America, North American industry?

Is there a North American vendor that's done brilliantly from this? The rewards seem to be mostly accruing to European companies, not American ones. So I'm not so convinced that it's an economic protectionism argument. Image. And even in Australia, what does it matter?

If we're buying French, American, Chinese, it's all still foreign. It's still buying from people more powerful than us. There's no sovereignty argument, as far as I can see, from an Australian point of view. Right. So, well, moreover, it speaks to that higher level concern around the security, geopolitical security concern. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I I kind of find it funny when people say, oh, we can't let Starlink play a role in universal service because run by a mercurial American, Elon Musk, who might turn us off on a whim. But you could technically say the same about any aspect of network infrastructure in Australia. If you picked a fight with the wrong person, it could probably be switched off. I'm not saying that's a genuine risk.

I'm just saying it's an example of where some of the debate in this area is a bit unhinged because sometimes an objection in one area applies equally in other areas, but the objection is never expressed in those areas. And a certain part of my career and through, I guess, the raising of profile of those issues around Chinese vendors, part of my job at times was to speak to journalists who may not necessarily be native telco journalists and bring them up to speed on what the issues might be.

I always had to spend a considerable amount of time convincing them if someone wanted to get in and hack the internet, they didn't need to have the equipment from a specific company to be able to do that. I mean, on a more fundamental level, in the 1990s, a disgruntled ex-Telstra technician with the keys to the tunnels under Sydney when hacked off the fiber optic cables of a small axe.

You know like like there's all there's many ways many ways to achieve an end here and vendor control in some ways almost lulls you into a false sense of security in the light of all the other vulnerabilities that do exist and and that's actually actually it's sort of funny that's sort of my great fear about this actually we sort of feel oh but we banned huawei that's enough, you know you've actually only just scraped the surface of your challenge well yeah where

does it end up whose internet wins orders one internet supersede another you know one technology standard after the other on it goes into the future well it's it's funny because we've talked about the cloud companies and you know like the fact that we've been so obsessed with shutting china out of the network has perhaps obscured another aspect to what's happening which is the increasing seen dominance of American cloud companies in our ecosystem.

You know, Google, Amazon, Meta, and so on. And I don't necessarily have any fundamental objection to that. But if you're worried about sovereignty, you've traded one dependence for another, I would say.

But secondly, I find it interesting in the light that in another political theatre, we're fighting some of these same companies as the enemies of society in terms of the pernicious damage that social media platforms are causing to the nation's youth and all those arguments that are being prosecuted over there. At the same time as these companies building up extreme influence over our network infrastructure.

So, I mean, there should be a whole distinct debate. I mean, I guess we're having one now about it, but I think there needs to be a broader acceptance of who the actors are in some of these different debates. And, you know, when I tell people that Google is the biggest owner of bandwidth in the world, a lot of people are quite surprised. A lot of people simply have no awareness that Google is an enormous player in the connectivity between countries.

You know, and we were talking before about government control of the fixed access network. Work and one thing we definitely don't control is the conduits in and out of the country well that's right and that's a good segue because i did wanted to bring it to the ott's and and i guess bringing you back to the conversation we were having around the evolution of the traditional.

Telco sector because you know the scale is phenomenal of these these these these companies And, you know, whether they're tapping into consumer or enterprise customers, they're disrupting markets with data and algorithms. But to an extent, they've been, you know, they've been built on the investments and the value that was provided by the telcos themselves.

I remember five or 10 years ago, there was a push by some of the major vendors, obviously on behalf of their carrier customers to call out these OTTs as freight loaders. I think Telefonica might've been one of the only carriers itself to really step out of its shell and have a go. But some of those same vendors that I mentioned, of course, have been happily arming the OTTs along the way for their growth through various data and network infrastructure.

I guess going to your comments there around the influence of these companies in the data space and the infrastructure space right through to the things that people are using them for every day and the whole data collection piece, where does that lead the telcos? Where's their relationship with the consumers these days? Are they just a conduit? It's a weird one, Tim. It's a really, really complex issue. There's no obvious answer. I wish there was because it is an existential issue for telcos.

The fact is, at the moment, they need the OTTs. I mean, it's one thing to say. I mean, there is obviously this argument which has some truth in it that the OTTs ride for free on networks at an access level. No doubt. No doubt about that. You know, they're not paying for access network infrastructure.

That's an empirical fact. But as I said, they are paying for a lot of the international connectivity that serves the content to people that makes it attractive for you to take a mobile broadband service in the first place. You know, Apple created the iOS. Google created Android. Without those things, I might not be spending 60, 70, 80 bucks a month on my mobile phone service. I might be after something a lot less functional and a lot cheaper. So, who's contributing value to who?

It's a really, really difficult equation. And no one, interestingly, no one seems to, well, the telcos talk a lot about losing value to the OTTs, but they do very little empirical research on it. And I suspect because it would come up with a very mixed result, which is they do actually need the OTTs to create value as much as they're contributing value. value so it's a it's a symbiotic thing now now here's my prediction.

This isn't thought through. It could be a subject for a book one day if I had the mindshare, though. Well, analyze the potential audience first, but yeah. Yeah, but it's only half a dozen people, yeah. My prediction is, though, that, and we talked before about how global scale was so important in the development of GSM, and Huawei having that WTO-enabled access to international telecom markets.

I'm going to make a prediction that because basically the big cloud companies have unfettered access to the world. They're going to be the big winners from global scale in terms of value. And telcos are going to play an increasingly smaller part of that value equation to the point where they are vulnerable to being taken over by some of these cloud companies. Now you can already see some early signs of that.

So Amazon Kuiper, the proposed Amazon Leosat network are talking very openly about going direct to big government and enterprise customers that use Amazon Web Services, bypassing the local network. But if you get to a point where you can already see what's happening in the Pacific Islands on this note, Starlink takes all the best yielding customers off the local telco, just leaving the local telco with the four or five buck a month customers.

Customers so those local telcos are rapidly losing the above the mean few generating customers that's really hindering their ability to invest in capex and their networks so starlink it's like you know a little bit like slash and burn farming yeah you're not leaving a viable ecosystem.

For the future and because there's no reason why this might not happen on a broader scale if cloud companies find ways to go to direct to customers satellite being a way or increasingly a lot of the direct fiber going from data centers to office buildings which don't involve nbn don't involve telstra these are you know complete you could literally be door-to-door of the same cloud company using a bit of dark fiber you know at both ends right so you've

got this issue of disintermediation of telcos. In the long term, that means they lose value. Perhaps their commercial value becomes below their replacement value. And if that happens, then why wouldn't a cloud company just buy a telco? If it becomes cheaper to buy the telco than to build your own access network, it's a build or buy decision.

It conceivably could happen. Now, some of the more pessimistic or half-glass-empty type thinkers in the inner sanctums of the telcos are actually talking about these issues right now. How do we survive in a world where cloud companies are just infinitesimally more valuable than us? And that curious step in the middle there as well, isn't there, where these cloud companies are actually running the telcos or the guts of the telcos?

Yeah, which is what makes it so fascinating. Running customer management, network operations, other parts of the business through the cloud offerings and the AI over the coming years as well, right? Yeah, no, I mean, hopefully, I don't want to, I don't think I'm breaking her confidence here, right?

I went to a kind of dinner with Vicky Brady, the CEO of Telstra, last year, and it was off, you know, not for attribution, so I probably shouldn't be saying this, but I actually asked her that question. I'm only going to tell you what she said because she gave a very diplomatic answer, which was, how do you reconcile the fact that you are in partnership with these people, but you're also in competition with them?

And look, as I say, this wasn't up for quotation, but the general gist of what she said to me was, well, it's just one of those complexities of modern life that have to be managed. The whole co-opetition thing is a reality and it's not likely it will ever resolve in a black or white way. It's always going to be a complex relationship where you can't wish these guys away. Amazon and Google are here for the long term and they do things you can't do as a national telco, but they still need you.

The existential question becomes if they don't need you anymore or if your own financial profile is such that you're not a bargaining partner from a position of strength, which I think is what some telcos are a little bit worried about, that their margins, are insufficient to have that kind of ROIC, return on invested capital profile, where they can approach a negotiation with a global cloud company from a position of some strength.

And I think that is a genuine fear that some telcos are worried about right now. Fascinating. Well, we're nearing the end now. Hopefully that's literally and not figuratively in the light of what we've just been talking about. Of this episode, covering the 30th anniversary of Communications Day, for me, the discussion always comes back to the physical reality of the network.

Nothing can occur without the network and inherently, I guess, barring the leaps of quantum computing, there'll always be limitations in what it can deliver. There's plenty of questions still to be answered, plenty of fodder for Communications Day to cover in the years ahead, I think. Graeme, what are your, I guess, thinking about 30 years in publication to now? And as we did in the last episode, we spoke a bit about the model of communications and where it fits.

What are your hopes for the future? Is it just about the industry keeping it entertaining? Well, is there something more profound you'd like to see happen as the way to serve society's needs? In terms of comms day itself or the telecom sector? I think the telecom sector. Yeah, yeah. Look. We've obviously, across this two-part podcast, talked about a lot of really big issues. But I guess one of the things is that these issues never really resolve.

They and sometimes they're not as existentially threatening in hindsight as they seemed like at the time so yeah you we were talking a bit about the nbn before and there were there were people who were very passionate about that debate to the you know of posting 24 7 about it losing friends, yeah all that all that kind of thing but in retrospect the sun still rose every morning the light's still switched on, and they can still send their email, right?

So sometimes we over-exaggerate the importance of some of these issues. But in terms of the telecom sector itself, I think it has an existential issue now that perhaps it didn't have 10 or 20 years ago because of some of these challenges.

It all comes down to this issue of global scale versus national sovereignty. There are no global telco equivalents to global cloud companies. I mean, Vodafone is the closest, but they're not even really a global company. They're a federation of national operators in terms of how they actually work in practice day to day. So I see that as the enormous issue that telcos have to think about.

And do they really want to take it up to cloud companies who, as we say, are also essential partners in other parts of their business? These are big questions for the telcos to resolve.

And it's hard because telcos themselves, by definition, can't even have common positions on a lot of these issues because you've got, as we were just talking about before, all the competitive carriers maintained a campaign of insurgency against Telstra in Australia for 20 years, they're not all suddenly going to sign up to a common platform of how to deal with OGTs. They all have differing incentives.

Well, we'll have ideologies, we'll have different economic approaches that are about what the consequences may be or what the wastage might be and where we should focus. Yeah, yeah. If Optus is working with Starlink to fill out its mobile coverage where it doesn't have terrestrial infrastructure, you can't expect Optus to go on a jihad against Elon Musk. It's not going to happen. So I just find there's some very, very interesting challenges there.

In terms of your question about how does comms day keep it entertaining, I don't think there's been much effort required at all. I think that's my point. The interesting thing is it keeps it entertaining. There's going to be plenty for us to write about, and I have a sneaking suspicion that because these things don't resolve quickly. If we were, God forbid the thought, if we were to do this podcast again in 20 years or 30 years' time, we might still be talking about some of the same issues.

I feel reasonably confident that the larger themes will still be there. So finally, what about comms day? What's next? Any chance of a color upgrade on the newsletter? Oh, we've been knowing to run color photos from time to time. AI-generated conferences? Or is it just stay the course, be reliable? Yeah, well, you know, if we'd got pervasive fiber in 2009, I guess we could have been doing hologram-based personal appearances by speakers by now. I only have myself to blame if we're not doing that.

But no, more seriously, I actually kind of think that the need for – I'm going to get a little philosophical here. One of the biggest issues with American democracy right now is that people have polarized versions of the truth. You know, that the MAGA crowd have a very different view of what reality is compared to, say, the San Francisco liberal crowd, you know, in terms of they don't watch the same common news.

They don't agree on the same common facts. And I think one of the roles that Commons Day does play is that we try and do establish a sort of a common reality as to what's actually happening. We ask questions. We have opinions, but we also give platforms to countering opinions. ends. There's nothing more I love than to have a story saying one thing one day and then a story the next day from someone else contradicting it.

I live for that. That seems to be the opposite of where a lot of public discourse is going at the moment. Ditto with our conferences. I think there's always going to be a room for something which I guess dates back to ancient Greek democracy in the amphitheater, which is having an audience in a space with speakers getting up and. Talking about their issues, talking about their plans, you know, talking about their ideas.

And I do think that those two things that we do, the daily publication and the biannual conferences, have a lot of future in them. And this might sound very, very boring of me, but I don't intend to change a thing. Magnificent. Well, once again, congratulations. Thank you, Tim. 30 years is no small feat. It's been terrific to look back with you. And be part of the celebration on these two episodes with you. Thanks for being here on your own podcast.

It's a weird experience being interviewed for me. But Tim, I also just wanted to thank you for engaging with this. You were a big part of Comms Day for over a decade, actually, if you add it all up. And of course, like me, you did a stint overseas in telecommunications journalism. You were in London, Telecom TV, where you made your mark there. And, you know, you've definitely played a very important role in the Australian telecom industry and the conversation that it's had with itself,

you know, over that period. So, thank you, Tim. Thank you. That's very kind. Well, we look forward to speaking to you again on another episode of Pomsday Live.