Telstra: The Legal Team Are Professionals

I often wonder what is the point of Telstra gaining money, if the next week, or next month, or next year, they are going to have to give it all back to where they get it from anyway?

Such a case has happened again recently, with Telstra ordered to return the ‘lunch money’ sum of $16 million to iiNet after the ACCC has mandated LSS prices of $2.50 should be backdated to when iiNet were first raising disputes about the $9.00 charge they were eating to provide ADSL2+ services.

Telstra has repeatedly claimed, barked, howled, and woofed that the competitors should build their own infrastructure in Australia.

When they manage to do this, through the help of regulated prices to ensure the business case remains viable, they are pickpocketed by Telstra and overcharged to the tune of millions.

More to it, the case is strung up in legal action with the ACCC and courts for 2 years, before they lose the case anyway.

As another Whirlpoolian has said, they’d buy shares in the law firm Telstra use, as long as it wasn’t a no win, no fee law firm, because they lose so much you’d wonder where they get an income from at all.

My take on that is, perhaps they should look elsewhere for advice on matters, as it seems the current legal team are getting nowhere.

They get a negative decision, ask for an appeal, get an appeal, lose the appeal.. what next..? Another High Court appeal that they will lose ANYWAY?

This is why I don’t own Telstra shares. They did look attractive at one stage there, at the rate they are going though, any value getting built in the shares is going to be quickly destroyed by wasting shareholder funds on propaganda websites, incompetent poll coders, and frivilous legal action.

It’s near time they accepted the fact that the competition is going to exist, either the easy way or the hard way, Australian’s WILL have competition.

A quote from a Telstra spokesman stated that “We will always protect our shareholders assets from any third party who enjoys privileged regulatory protection so they don’t have to build, install and maintain their own infrastructure”.

What a load of crock, the ACCC dispute (and resolution) was over LSS, that is, iiNet installing their OWN infrastructure in exchanges, and renting a part of the copper line TELSTRA ALREADY COLLECTS LINE RENTAL FROM to provide an additional service, which they don’t maintain at all.

The claim that they don’t have to build, install and maintain their own infrastructure is absolute rubbish.

It’s not economical to duplicate a copper network. It’s stupid to even consider that, as the copper is a old, aging asset, and many advanced countries looked at fibre over copper for the obvious advantages.

So, for any new ISP to consider the argument above, they would need to roll out their own fibre, because they’d be dumb to roll out copper, to each house they want to service.

That’s a high installation cost, and no easy task, and in fact, not a good task given the FTTN debate, which still uses the copper network.

I think Telstra have lost the plot, first they state that they want competitiors to invest in their own infrastructure, and when they do that, they still state that’s not good enough, because they are paying to use a part of a line that Telstra already makes a full retail or wholesale line rental return from anyway.

To challenge this ruling is even more absurd, because they’ll lose, it’s the ACCC that mandated the pricing of $2.50, and the Act specifies that the decisions can be backdated, and generally are.

In my honest opinion, and I’m being extremely wide open here, Telstra would achieve a lot more, shutting it’s wide open cakehole, and working with industry for an outcome that is beneficial to everyone.

It makes perfect sense to work with industry, working against it is just going to burn the profits they are making now with a negative outcome for them, and a even more positive outcome for everyone else.

Telstra, look at what happened with the OPEL decision. If you don’t want that to happen in Metro Australia, where the majority of market share is, it’s time to get up, get your act together, and get a proposal that will consider the interests of EVERYONE involved. If you can’t do that, you aren’t in the right job, get a plane, let someone else do it properly.

BT have done it properly, and they’ve stated time and time again, it’s been a great business move.

For supposed professional CEOs from the USA, they certainly aren’t doing a good job at maintaining a popular face in the industry they have a monopoly in.

Reading another article, I was filtering through the talkback comments, and of the 48 comments on the ZDNet article, I’m surprised at how many comments are slagging off Telstra, but you can’t blame the people, something gave them that perception to start with, and since 2005, they have done very, very little to get those users back on the team, to get them at least tolerating, or in support of the actions Telstra takes.

That to me says volumes more. Users are annoyed, they’ve done nothing to improve the image.

In fact, they’ve done a lot to damage the image.

Enjoy!