Leading satellite news source Talk Satellite has combined with CommsDay to convene the inaugural Australasia Satellite Forum.

AUSTRALASIA SATELLITE FORUM
Four Seasons Hotel, George St Sydney
Wednesday 21 April 2010

Join top speakers from the Australasian and international satellite industry as they discuss:

In his most revealing public discussion yet, NBN Co executive chairman Mike Quigley has dashed HFC network operators’ hopes of vending their assets to the proposed National Broadband Network.

Telstra’s extensive wireless broadband price cuts may have an unintended consequence—they will render the Next G offering on a par with the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s definition of what constitutes “metro-comparable broadband” and virtually eliminate national eligibility of ISPs to collect Australian Broadband Guarantee subsidies.

PLDT, a member of the AAG submarine cable system, has signed an agreement with Level 3 to use the latter’s “cable landing station connectivity at the AAG system.”

The deal now provides “a diverse and scalable extension of the PLDT pan-Asian network to carry voice, data and video traffic in the US,” the operators said.

Alcatel-Lucent continues to support Juniper Networks equipment at Telecom NZ despite a failed High Court injunction late last year.

It’s that time of year again where CommsDay founder Grahame Lynch takes a look at back at year of issues to judge his 15 Australian telecom people of the year.

Is history important? Seemingly not in the fact-free environment that the Australian government’s policies on the NBN and Telstra separation have been framed.

In a blog post this week, Alan Kohler raised an interesting question: do we need both structural separation of Telstra and the NBN? (If you’re interested, you can find it by looking at Alan’s articles at www.businesspectator.com.au, headlined “The NBN solution was there all along”).

The Australian National Broadband Network’s request for capability statements from “active network” vendors is now out — and not a moment too soon for vendors.

After all it is now over four years since Telstra first proposed its Fibre-to-the-node network upgrade, and let’s be frank, not an awful lot has actually been built since.

One question in the fibre network debate relates to whether a new open access infrastructure will destroy ISPs’ ability to differentiate their services in the last mile. Since everybody will be using the same network, won’t all their access services look the same?

Has Nick Minchin’s single minded pursuit of the Rudd government over the carbon trading legislation, an action which now looks like delivering the ALP electoral gold, denied the opposition the chance to make the

NBN a highly damaging issue for the government at the next election?