place your bets, ladies and gentlemen

Government to make a decision on pricing before May...maybe in the next couple of days.

Just remember a lousy outcome could mean -

* no investment in a new network

* no sale of TLS, perhaps ever.

Also the Government own 50% of it and that is a lot of c0ck on the block....and I am sure it wants to get the best price it can for those shares.

If it doesn't look after it's own interests, it stands to lose a lot.

The shares will tank and they may never get the price up again ever.

Seems like a no brainer to me.



D-day on Telstra pricing as ACCC reports
Michael Sainsbury
April 01, 2006
TELSTRA'S bid to overturn pricing decisions by the competition regulator is expected to be decided in the next month after Communications Minister Helen Coonan was handed a special report yesterday.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was asked in December to justify its decision to reject Telstra's wholesale pricing proposal.

Senator Coonan and Finance Minister Nick Minchin will both travel overseas in late April and are expected to have settled the issue before then.

Senator Minchin told The Australian he would travel to Tokyo, Paris and London to talk to investors about Telstra and other finance matters.

"If the sale goes ahead, I will travel to the US later in the year," he said.

Senator Coonan will address the World Information Technology Congress in Texas on May 2, after joining an Australian IT delegation in San Francisco and attending a broadcasting conference in Las Vegas.

The ACCC report landed as Telstra chief executive Sol Trujillo moved to soften rising tension between the Government and the telco.

Telstra has spent the past few weeks lobbying coalition backbenchers, but the move appears to have backfired.

Telstra representatives has visited some members of parliament up to six times, a campaign described by one MP as "bullying" and raising fears that it is trying to crush competition.

"We are having constructive conversations with the ACCC, literally as we speak," Mr Trujillo told a banking conference in Hong Kong.

"I think that hopefully over the next few days or week or two or whatever you will see less rhetoric and more real conversation occurring."

Telstra has finally started a separate round of talks with the ACCC with a view to gaining some investment certainty on its planned $3 billion residential fibre network, more than six months after first raising the project.

But the company is expected to get little joy from yesterday's report, with the ACCC expected to stick to its earlier position -- that it is appropriate to consider access pricing to Telstra's network in four separate geographic bands.

Telstra has raised the possibility of an appeal to the Australian Competition Tribunal if it doesn't get his way.

The ACCC must now consider a separate proposal from Telstra for a national averaged price for renting its copper wires.