G9 Crew Ready Their Troops

Hot on the heels of the Federal Budget's allocation of $4.7 billion for the National Broadband network -- money that many pundits are tipping will go to Telstra as the only company possibly viable to meet the expected tender -- the G9 consortium of opposing ISPs (AAPT, iinet, Internode, Macquarie Telecom, Optus, PowerTel, Primus, Soul, and TransACT) has appointed former NSW Treasurer Michael Egan as chairman of the G9 group. Presumably it takes a former politician to take on existing politicians, or something in that style.

Egan's certainly been a busy lad since leaving politics in 2005; the official release also notes that he's Chancellor of Macquarie University, Chairman of the Centenary Institute of Cancer Medicine and Cell Biology and Chairman of the Australia Day Council of New South Wales. That's a lot of chairs for him to concurrently stack.

That doesn't seem to fuss the G9 group, with Michael Simmons, the managing director of the G9's National Broadband Network project commenting in the release that "“Mr. Egan was an outstanding Treasurer for NSW and is fully aware of the need for structural separation and continued regulation where monopolistic infrastructure exists. I am certain together we can convince the Federal Government to appoint an alternate to Telstra & implement appropriate regulation of the network owner." Simmons himself was only appointed to his role last week.

The G9 group already has a number of outspoken ISP CEOs on its board, including Primus CEO Ravi Bhatia and Internode's MD Simon Hackett. The G9 board is comprised of the CEOs of each of the member ISPs -- Primus Telecom’s Ravi Bhatia, Macquarie Telecom’s David Tudehope, Optus’ Paul O’Sullivan, AAPT’s Paul Reynolds, Internode’s Simon Hackett, iiNet’s Michael Malone, PowerTel’s Paul A. Broad, Soul’s Michael Simmons and TransACT’s John Mackay. To call them big fans of Telstra might be stretching matters a little.

While Egan and co will presumably be pushing the political buttons in order to try to secure the NBN bid, both the G9 and Telstra continue to try to gather public support as well; Telstra, rather frequently through its "Now We Are Talking" blog and the G9 rather less frequently through two blogs -- "www.tellthetruthtelstra.com.au" and "www.fairgobroadband.com.au".