Telstra yet again wastes more shareholder funds after the court case launched against Helen Coonan was thrown out of court.
Telstra’s case had no real grounding from the get go, and documents from Telstra show that they intended to launch action against Coonan, even if the outcome wasn’t going to go Telstra’s way.
Telstra’s reasoning for the case seem to be not just to get hold of any key decision making documents, but rather, get access to documents revealing the intended roll out areas, so Telstra could prepare itself and compete against OPEL.
Essentially, Telstra want access to strategic business data from OPEL, and naturally, they aren’t going to get that, so they tried to do it with force, as well, delay the OPEL deployment as much as possible by placing the funding in question through the court case.
Telstra’s follow up tagline is centered around the government keeping secret the OPEL program, being quoted in the media as “”The decision today means that the Australian Government has succeeded in keeping secret how it came to a decision to spend $1 billion of tax payers money on a program that didn’t even fulfil the original aims,” he said.” – I’ve seen plenty on the OPEL plan, and further Telstra resorted to Singapore based racism, attacking Optus for being a partnership with Elders.
The government aren’t trying to keep anything secret here, far from it, they want everyone to know that OPEL is coming, it’s the bargaining chip for the election to counter Rudd’s proposed situation, which would essentially not solve many problems at all, and instead, create many more.
In other news to attempt to dull out Telstra’s court case loss (and big mass loss of shareholder funds in legal fees, and being ordered to pay Coonan’s legal bills), the news of 211 proposed ADSL enabled exchanges was bought about today.
211 exchanges across Australia will finally get ADSL broadband services under the Australian Broadband Guarantee, giving Telstra $98 million in funding to provide services to areas. The ABG consisted of $162.5 million in funding, and we can assume that there is still some funding left for the likes of Internode to continue deployment to areas where they can service.
My thoughts here are that the government should now completely no longer assist Telstra at all with any more services, Telstra’s profits well and truly could cover such minor expenses as that, considering they also choose to burn cash on vexatious lawsuits against the Australian government, burn a lot of shareholder funds in advertising which is misleading, burn a lot of funds in misleading websites, burn a lot of funds in general.
I imagine the total of all expenses above would come close to half that $98 million.. Telstra could have easily managed to spend that.
I believe our government really needs to exclude Telstra from any subsidy style funding tenders, so that competition can get a fair go in areas where the costs to service a customer might not be cheap, but with subsidy style funding, they could become viable.
Supporting Telstra’s greed does consumers little in the way of good. The government (either side) need to recognise that.
Enjoy!