Opinion: NBN gets niggly

The latest salvo has come from the "Tell the Truth Telstra" website which is an initiative of non-Telstra carriers and ISPs including all the members of the Terria consortium.

The TTTT website has taken umbrage with Telstra's stated intention to "walk away" from the NBN process if it doesn't get to own it after it builds it in other words Telstra isn't keen to share, which is not unusual in itself.

But the TTTT crowd claims Telstra is bluffing, countering that "Telstra has time and again stamped its foot and said it will take its bat and ball and go home unless it gets what it wants.

"However, when it comes to the crunch Telstra can no sooner bring itself to walk away than a pig can refuse to put its snout in the trough."

The telco and ISP crowd must have been drinking the same Kool-Aid they give to US presidential candidates what with all this focus on what pigs look like and how they might behave when dressed-up or feeding.

But we get their point. Back in 2006, Telstra told the previous government it wouldn't play by the rules and wouldn't be bidding for the now defunct Broadband Connect initiative.

Yet days later the telco did indeed lodge a bid that it had obviously been working on for months, and which it later admitted in court, was indeed the case.

And this year, Telstra began threatening in June that the process for the NBN tender was taking too long and they needed to spend the money they'd been saving for the project on other things.

That failed to get the government moving any faster, hardly surprising for anyone who's tried to get any government anywhere moving faster.

The next ploy from Telstra was a threat made very public by Countrywide manager Geoff Booth when he told a newspaper reporter that "we will not bid [for the NBN] if separation is not taken off the table."

Out here in the real world, we the public can only hope as much energy gets put into actually building the NBN as both sides are putting into the mud-slinging match.

And, yeah we know it's not likely, but could the Minister for Communications hurry along and get the tender decided? Soon?