Communications Minister Helen Coonan has accused Labor of abandoning rural and regional phone customers – who rely heavily on the CDMA network – because she says Labor does not support imposing a licensing condition on Telstra to keep the network open.
Telstra has said it wants to shut down the CDMA network early next year, with customers beings transferred to its new Next G phone network.
The sticking point is that government wants to hold Telstra to its promise that the CDMA would not be turned off until Next G provided “equivalent or better” coverage for Australia’s rural and regional users.
“Not only will Labor abolish the $2 billion regional Communications Fund to finance a commercial network in metropolitan areas, but now Labor will be prepared to sit back and potentially leave hundreds of thousands of thousands of regional mobile phone users stranded if Telstra’s Next G network does not provide adequate replication of CDMA coverage and services,” Senator Coonan said.
“Until now Labor has been silent on this important national network transition, but yesterday and today Labor’s communications spokesman Stephen Conroy declared that a licence condition will ‘impose costs on Telstra which provided no meaningful consumer benefit’ and that the initiative ‘actually doesn’t help consumers’,” she said.
Labor communications spokesman Stephen Conroy said Senator Coonan was misleading the public as part of a “desperate tactic” in the run up to the election.
“Labor has consistently stated Telstra would not be allowed to switch off its CDMA network unless it met its promise to the Australian public over coverage and service,” Senator Conroy said in a statement.
“Labor has continually argued for better regulation in the telecommunications sector given Telstra’s market power. However over the past 10 years the number of substantive pages of regulation has increased from 1,602 to 10,013,” he said.
“Examples of wasteful regulation that Labor opposed in parliament was the Government’s operational separation regime, which has increased costs to Telstra with no benefits to consumers.”
For more Telecommunications news, click here.
