Published on the 20/07/2017 | Written by Jonathan Cotton
Checking in on the slow-motion rollout…(spoiler alert: It’s you)
As the $49b NBN rollout’s limp worsens the government appears to be responding by breaking the legs of potential competitors.
NBN Co is now pushing for its proposed tax – which it had said was in the name of supplying services to the rural market – to be extended to “all business services”.
If passed, the tax would require all carriers to pay a $7.10 fee per premise (fixed-line connections they supply capable of providing average downloads speeds of 25Mbps), per month.
No one’s pleased with the proposal, especially not the affected telcos, which say the tax is starting to look more like an anti-competitive gambit to protect NBN’s future moves into the enterprise space.
ISP telco said as much in a submission to Parliament on Monday, stating that the proposal damages the company’s ability to compete in telecommunications markets through “curtailing our ability to build and operate networks and requiring that we pay a substantial tax that most of our competitors are largely exempt from paying.”
“The cost will be passed on to consumers and risks consumers shifting their buying preference to other technologies such as fixed wireless or mobile that become comparatively cheaper because they are not subject to the tax,” it said.
That’s a fair point, but someone’s got to pay for it and TPG’s alternative funding sources boil down to either general taxation or taxing over-the-top service providers such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. Those groups will “derive more financial benefit from NBN Co’s services in regional areas than the carriers operating competing networks in other geographic areas, who do not actually derive any benefit from the NBN,” said the telco.
Telstra has similarly withdrawn its support for the broadband tax saying the levy “applies too broadly, is too uncertain in how it defines liability to pay and as a result will be difficult and costly for carriers to administer.”
And it’s not just the telcos in a huff. General enthusiasm for the NBN appears to be slumping towards an all-time low, as the rollout reaches its halfway mark with less than half of the eligible NBN premises connected.
And for those end users who have connected?
A recent CHOICE internet service provider satisfaction survey released earlier this month showed that around 60 percent had had issues with their service in the last six months, 42 percent reported disconnections/dropouts/variable performance issues with their NBN provider in the past six months, and 31 percent mentioned problems connecting to the network.
