I presented a paper at the CommsDay Summit in Sydney today (15th April 2008).

A copy of the paper can be downloaded here.

(The presentation is a 4.6 Mb PDF file, load it into a PDF viewer and use the ‘slideshow’ or ‘view full screen’ or equivalent option in your viewer to page through the presentation slides).

I aim to put up an alternative version of the presentation when I can (a little smaller and a possibly annotated).

The presentation explains the myth of ‘Full Node Cutover’ - what it is, what it means, and why doing so is such a bad idea.

I’ll write more on this topic, and I plan to write a critique of the FTTN tender document for an national FTTN network as a separate article soon too - it definitely justifies one, it is just... a train wreck.

Meantime, the thrust of the presentation made today is about ‘coexistence’ - about not throwing all of our eggs in one basket called ‘FTTN’ when that is simply not necessary.

Moreover, cutting off the existing access regime at the roots is very bad for consumer pricing, for consumer choice, and for the preservation of any meaningful use of the term ‘competition’ in the Australian telecommunications context in the future.