I was curious to hear what people think of the telecom breakup into chorus (and wasn’t there a third party as well?) after all these years?
I was working there at the time, so some of the staff training was entertaining. I felt like they seemed to be on board with the general thrust of the changes, which I was a little surprised about (I expected a little more lip-service, I guess?)
Has it been a good change? I feel like the national fibre has been great but that’s not actually related (but may have relied on the breakup as a precursor?)
From my understanding, the break up of telecom was a condition of the government giving Chorus billions of dollars to build the fiber network. They weren’t going to hand one ISP a multi billion dollar network, it wouldn’t have been a fair playing field.
I think the breakup of chorus has been great. Lines were open before if my memory serves me right, but it does feel like there is proper competition in the ISP market which was previously dominated by Spark and Vodafone.
Spark buying out all my favourite ISPs is a bit rough, but I definitely think things would be worse without it. You can get fast internet for $60-$70 a month, which is really quite cheap considering how critical internet is to everyday life.
Yes, unfortunately, it still feels like there’s really only two telcos in the country - with various rebadged products (skinny, et al - I’ve list track of who’s actually who).
Then again, our population density is probably off putting for any prospective telcos eyeing up the market!
Specifically for broadband/fiber internet, we have heaps of ISPs. Lots of power companies selling internet as an add on, you can get it with your Sky subscription, and lots of little outfits you’ve never heard of. Spark owns half a dozen of the bigger ones, but there are plenty of others too.
This is a direct result of anyone being able to resell the internet provided by Chorus.
I’m not sure if this can be applied to Google in reality, but imagine if Google Search had to split from Google Search API and had to sell access to the search API at the same terms to anyone. You would get lots of little search engines that use Google Search API as a backend, and you would have no reason to use Google Search as the frontend because of the ads and tracking. They would retain a large market share (as Spark have), but would have to fight with others to have the best customer experience if they wanted people to keep using their search website.