Spectrum Auction, page-72

This is all a vestige from the past. It made sense when there was a single telecomms operator who owned the telecomms infrastructure under monopoly rules. Similar rules are necessary in other areas where there is a monopoly operator. Examples are railways and roads (it does not make sense to have more than one road/railway between two cities) or utilities (i.e electricity network (not generation), water, sewage, gas distribution etc). The ACCC oversight of TLS comes from the days it was a monopoly operator and were embodied section 63 (3) of the Telecommunication Act 1997. Times have changed the NBN is responsible for the national telecomms infrastructure and should not be applied to mobile comms (although I guess the argument of Vodaphone would be that the RF spectrum is limited, however they should bid for it). I guess the telecomms act needs updating but this is unlikely to be at the top of the agenda for the current government; in the meantime we suffer uncertainty. Just hope the ACCC look at the issue in a pragmatic sense and realize that this is a competitive area and incentives are needed to motivate investment in a country of only 24m which is the size of USA (without Alaska) where almost all of these people live in the major cities. Problem we face is that I understand that in USA (15 times Australia's population) and Canada (all along the US border) mobile service are declared.