Historical paper: The 2004 Proposal for the Structural Separation of Telstra
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Keywords
History, Telecommunications, Structural Separation, National Broadband Network, Malcolm Turnbull
Abstract
A comment by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on 23 October 2017 has re-awakened interest in the possibility that lay open in 2004 for the then Coalition government, of which Mr Turnbull was a member, to have preceded New Zealand in reaping the benefits of structural separation of the incumbent carrier. The paper “Revisiting the Stuctural Separation of Telstra”, published in the Spring 2004 issue of the Telecommunications Journal of Australia and republished below, provided not just the policy rationale for structural separation, but also detailed how it could have been achieved.
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References
Independent Australia. (2017). Peter Gerrand, ‘And now for Malcolm Turnbull’s latest NBN trick’. 25 October 2017. Retrieved from https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/and-now-for-malcolm-turnbulls-latest-nbn-trick,10857
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Peter Gerrand, Melbourne University
Life Member, TelSocHonorary Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne School of Engineering, University of MelbourneAdjunct Associate Professor (Research) in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University
Peter Gerrand was awarded the Charles Todd Medal by ATUG in 1998 'for outstanding contributions to the telecommunications industry', an Australian Government Centenary Medal in 2003 'for outstanding service to science and technology particularly to public science policy', and Life Membership by the TSA in 2003.
He is now an honorary academic and a freelance writer. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Telecommunications Journal of Australia (1994-2013), and of TJA's successor, the Australian Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy (2013-14), of which he remains an Associate Editor. He was a founding Director of TelSoc (July 2013), the reincarnation of the former Telecommunications Society of Australia. He stepped down from the TelSoc Board in October 2015.
From 2004-2007 he carried out research at La Trobe University in the School of European and Historical Studies, and was awarded a PhD in Spanish and Catalan studies in 2008. His thesis, “Minority languages on the Internet: promoting the regional languages of Spain”, was published by VDM Verlag in 2009.
Amongst career highlights, he was an engineering executive in Telecom Australia/Telstra where he successively led network research, network product development, network planning and network strategy groups, until 1993. He subsequently became a professor of telecommunications at two universities (RMIT in 1993-6 and then Melbourne from 1996 to the present). He was the founding CEO of the University of Melbourne’s subsidiary Melbourne IT from 1996 to 2000, which he established as a successful international domain name registrar before publicly listing it in December 1999 (ASX: MLB). He developed AUSTEL’s Interconnect Model (1995) as an independent expert consultant to the Australian telecommunications regulator. From 1993 to 2003 he was Chairman of the Telecommunication Society of Australia Ltd.
He is author of the monograph An Interconnection Model for Modern Telecommunications (1998) and ‘Revisiting the Structural Separation of Telstra’ (2004). The latter article served to rekindle policy debate on that topic after it had been ruled out by the then Minister for Communications.
He is also author of 'Cultural diversity in cyberspace: the Catalan campaign to win the new .cat top level domain' (2006) and 'Estimating linguistic diversity on the Internet: a taxonomy to avoid pitfalls and paradoxes” (2007). The latter paper was responsible for successfully debunking the statistical data hitherto republished by UNESCO and the OECD on the diversity of language usage on the Internet. His most recent published paper is 'Cuba's Winners and Losers' in Inside Story.
He is currently an honorary Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne School of Engineering, University of Melbourne; and an Adjunct Associate Professor (Research) in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.
