Which Road for Australia?

It isn't yet clear which road Australian regulators have in mind for that country's contestants. An inter-modal framework such as that used in the United States is one option. So is the intra-modal, robust wholesale access model prevalent in Western Europe. In Australia, it would be Telstra that builds the fiber-to-home network that other competitors would have wholesale access to.

At some point, the log jam has to be broken or consumers and businesses in Australia are not going to have access to the bandwidth they are going to need. Up to this point Telstra has been able to rely on wireless and new Internet access services to offset declines in voice revenue. But nobody really thinks that can go on forever.

Neighbor New Zealand already has opted for an "operational separation" regime that separates wholesale network operations from retail sales operations for all players in the market that want to take advantage of the wholesale access network.