Senator ALSTON (Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) (8:01 PM) —I apologise for being distracted a moment ago. There should be competition in the marketplace to provide the incentives for price reductions, and there has not been that to date. The next best option is for carriers to interconnect with Telstra's ISDN system; in other words, ideally they would roll out their own. They would be offering a competing, stand-alone ISDN product. They have not done that because they have not got the networks to do it, particularly in non-metropolitan Australia. So the next best thing is to get access to Telstra's ISDN network.

Until something is a declared service, you simply ask Telstra and they can say no or they can charge you an arm and a leg, and you are left lamenting. But under the new competition regime—part XIB and XIC of the Trade Practices Act—you are entitled to approach a carrier, seek to negotiate on fair and reasonable terms and get an `affordable' price, in your terminology. If you do not get that or you are not satisfied, you then apply to the ACCC and the ACCC declares it as a service, which means you can then, in the absence of commercial agreement, have the matter arbitrated. So for the first time the ACCC will be able to set a wholesale price for interconnect access to Telstra's network in terms of ISDN availability. That means other carriers will be able to offer competing ISDN products on a much lower cost base than if they simply had to take whatever price Telstra gave them. So that is a very significant step forward.

I am not sure that anyone has yet sought to have the matter arbitrated. But there is nothing particularly surprising about that: the threshold issue is to make it a declared service; once it is, then everyone knows that unless you do a deal you will find yourself in arbitration. So I think it is inevitable that there will be, either by agreement or by determination of the ACCC, a much more affordable and attractive wholesale rate which will then enable real competition to occur in the marketplace.

What might that be? In some respects ISDN is an interim technology—64 kilobits is not bad these days but you can probably do a lot better. If you have direct satellite downlinks, you may not need ISDN on the fixed line anymore. As you are probably aware, Telstra and other carriers around the world are investigating what is called a suite of DSL technologies, which enable you to use the existing copper pairs. That may well prove to be much more cost effective than ISDN, which is, I suppose, in some part why we only mandated capability rather than availability. So all I can say to you is all the signs are propitious. One way or another there is going to be increasing demand and there is going to be an increasing number of suppliers wanting to meet that demand. Telstra has bottleneck capacity in a number of areas. We have, I think, a world leading regime to tackle that and therefore I would expect that ISDN or equivalent services are going to be widely available and affordable in the not too distant future.