Telco guru calls on the government to privatise NBN
AUSTRALIA’S global telco entrepreneur Peter Adderton has called on the government to privatise the NBN, and pour its money into young people’s ideas that can change the world.
The founder of Boost Mobile, who started his $5bn company in a one-bedroom Sydney apartment, said Australia had its “foot half on the brake” of the $50bn National Broadband Network.
“It should not be the government, it should be privatised and it should be broken up to people who will compete against each other, but it’s got to be privatised and it shouldn’t be left to the government to operate,” Mr Adderton said.
“I came back here (from the US) and looked at the NBN, tried to hook it up twice and it is the worst experience.”
While the rollout of the NBN was finished late last year, the prospect of any sale by Canberra is still seen as some time off, particularly while the network continues to make a loss.
In its annual report released in August, NBN said it was committed to delivering access to peak wholesale download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second to all eligible premises, and at least 50Mbps to 90 per cent of fixed-line premises.
Mr Adderton, who sold the US arm of his Boost business more than a decade ago, also called for more local competition to bring telco prices down.
“The problem with Australia is that the three carriers (Telstra, Optus and Vodafone) are doing their best to protect themselves from disruption,” he said.
“I do think we will see an NBN-like model where you’ll have different brands reselling our (telco) infrastructure.
“Now we already do it with Boost, but I expect to see Amazon
and Netflix come in … you could buy an Echo from Amazon and it might come with five gigabytes of data.”
Mr Adderton also said Australia needed to stop its talent pool being swallowed up by tech hubs such as Silicon Valley.
He said big investors also needed to get behind start-ups to give Australians a go.
“Why don’t we start reinvesting back into our youth and our future?”