NBN BUZZ: A pointless Quigley quagmire

Quigley on trial by media

Any meaningful debate about the National Broadband Network was hijacked this week by questions surrounding the integrity of the two most senior officials at NBN Co and the process the Labor government used to hire them. On Friday the government admitted that it was unaware that Alcatel-Lucent, the previous employer of NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley and chief financial officer Jean-Pascal Beaufret, was at the tail end of a five-year investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in bribery allegations.

Opposition Communications spokesperson Malcolm Turnbull was keen to feed the media with bemusement as to why this didn't come up: “It is remarkable that Mr Quigley and Mr Beaufret apparently did not consider a bribery scandal involving their previous employer was a matter they should raised with their future employer.”

After a week of unflattering suggestions about his conduct and that of his right-hand-man, Mike Quigley had had enough, responding with in The Australian on Thursday. “Some in the media have suggested erroneously that we ourselves were being investigated. Yet we are being maligned for events in which we played no part, for which we were never investigated, questioned or even contacted, but that we were subsequently instrumental in helping to resolve to the satisfaction of the legal and regulatory authorities. It is disappointing that our integrity has been questioned over these events and a distraction from the important job we have in designing and building the NBN.”

The only thing Quigley and Beaufret can really be accused of is a lack of political nous by failing to tell Communications Minister Stephen Conroy at the time of their appointments that the story, though irrelevant to their appointments, would come up.

The executive recruitment firm that identified the pair Egon Zhender meekly claimed that they conduct “background checks” on their candidates, without shedding any light on whether they failed to find the readily available information, or just ignored it.

Delimiter's Renai LeMay offered not just a spirited defence of Quigley, but a warning for Turnbull: “As the National Broadband Network continues to be rolled out, the politician will be forced to publicly realise, as he undoubtedly already does privately, that the Coalition's stark opposition to the project is increasingly fruitless and will need to be discarded as the percentage of Australia connected to government-funded fibre increases.

"But one thing will remain constant throughout the next few years. If Turnbull continues to attack Mike Quigley in public, he will only erode the only real political asset which is left to him: His own integrity.”

The National Monitoring Network

All this was a distraction from the “framing paper” released by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy last week that prompted Business Spectator's Stephen Bartholomeusz to contemplate the possible implications the NBN could have for media regulation. “One of the under-discussed implications of the national broadband network is that by displacing the existing copper and HFC networks with a publicly owned fixed line monopoly, government will have far greater control over the content delivered over the internet to the home.

"Given Conroy's fixation with internet filtering, the potential for governments to restrict and regulate access to content in a post-NBN future would be considerable.  In that post-NBN world, convergence – where content can be distributed across multiple digital platforms – could lead to more restrictions on content even as the digital era opens up the prospect of greater diversity of content and content providers.”

Crikey's Bernard Keane responded by asking whether the implied alternative is any better: “Sadly, the idea that privately controlled networks aren't just as easily used by governments interested in spying on their citizens or controlling what they see online doesn't stand up. Reconstituted US telco monolith AT&T was happy to help the Bush Administration spy on what Americans were seeing and doing online.  Middle East regimes used, and doubtless still use, tools from a range of Western private sector IT companies to do the same, and to censor internet usage. Indeed, there's a whole cyber military-industrial complex fed by the vast funding of the national security state mentality of western governments in the last decade.

"Nor let us forget the enthusiasm with which Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Amazon implemented the Obama Administration's anger at WikiLeaks by trying to strangle it online. Bartholomeusz's conviction that only governments will “restrict and regulate access to content” is almost touchingly naïve. Still, his point about the impulse to regulate online is an important one – indeed the most important one raised by the government's convergence review.”

Champions go missing

Given that the NBN is by far the most expensive project this government will attempt, The Australian was unsurprised to hear Labor had hired a list of “champions” to sell it: “The best way to champion the NBN would have been to do the due diligence in the first place. Instead, we get another example of a government addicted to spin.”

It could be worse than even The Australian imagined, with ZDNet's Phil Dobbie suggesting in his blog 'Twisted Wire' that even the government's spin is spin. “The list included retired High Court Judge Michael Kirby, conservationist Tim Flannery and CSIRO development head James Bradfield Moody. Most said they hadn't been approached by the government and none wanted to come on Twisted Wire to talk up benefits that the NBN would provide.” Champions are supposed to win games for you, these guys didn't even rock up to the ground.

NBN turns dealmaker

Speculation was rife this week about deals between NBN Co and smaller telcos. The Australian reported: “The National Broadband Network company will within days hand Optus a lucrative deal to be the prime contractor and controller of an interim satellite solution that will service broadband-hungry consumers in the bush.”

Then it was IPSTAR's turn with this offering from ComputerWorld: “Australian satellite operator IPSTAR is likely to become one of several sub-contractors to Optus under a deal to provide interim satellite services under the National Broadband Network (NBN).”

Finally, Vodafone Hutchison joined the party with  a confirmed deal: “Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) has taken its first steps to providing consumer fixed-line broadband services by joining the mainland National Broadband Network (NBN) trials. In April, NBN Co announced 12 ISPs signed up to provided services for the five trial site with services to be switched on in Armidale, NSW, initially. Participants included AAPT, AARNet, Exetel, Internode, Optus, Telstra and iPrimus.” Vodafone makes lucky 13.

And speaking of deals, NBN Co's $11 billion deal with Telstra nearly feel through according to the Australian Greens and telco industry sources, AAP reports. The sticking point was Telstra's existing copper network, which will be gradually replaced by NBN Co's fibre over the next nine years. Telstra demanded than in the meantime it be allowed to charge smaller players higher prices to access the copper network and would walk away from the negotiations if the government didn't grant that wish.

Wrap up

In other NBN news, a former Telstra manager has warned that the network's planned exposed overhead cables could put some communities at greater risk during bushfires, floods and cyclones. After reviewing Telstra's assets and adhering to a request from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, NBN Co must build 10 of its very own network exchange buildings in metro areas. In Melbourne, the people of Brunswick are about to be used as broadband guinea pigs as NBN Co prepares to roll out the technology to 2600 properties that have signed up to test it. The Federal Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Population and Communities (is that all?) Tony Burke has again thrown his support behind the NBN for the benefits that could flow to regional Australia. However, the cost of connecting regional properties to the NBN with wireless and satellite could be 10 times that of connecting city properties to the fibre network.