Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has been sweating on Optus and Elders, a subsidiary of Futuris, to slip up in their OPEL regional broadband joint venture. Finally, they did (he says) so he has chopped them off.
In fact OPEL has been a sitting duck ever since the Coalition lost the election and Labor won.
The $958 million Broadband Connect subsidy they won from the former Communications Minister Helen Coonan was a political response to Labor's $4.7 billion national broadband plan designed purely to get John Howard through the election campaign with something to say on the subject of broadband.
But the two plans directly conflicted. Conroy is offering $4.7 billion for someone to build a national fibre to the node (FTTN) or fibre to the home (FTTH) network covering 98 per cent of Australian homes and businesses; Optus and Futuris got nearly $1 billion to cover the regional parts of the country with a combination of fibre and wireless. If both went ahead, it would be an expensive, pointless, overbuild.
So it's with some relief that Conroy finds he can now cancel the contract because the OPEL group has, he says, failed to meet the coverage promises.
Optus and Elders maintain, however, that all conditions have been satisfied, and the consortium was capable of "meeting the objectives of the Government's Broadband Connect Infrastructure Program…"
