Callpoint's principal contributed the following article to Rural Bash.  Volume 1, Issue 14, March 2005.  Reproduced with permission.

Dear RuralComms

I read with interest Robert Brand’s observations regarding Page Research’s proposal that $7bn be spent on a fibre deployment in rural and regional areas:

(a) The need to have complete visibility of Telstra’s assets prior to T3
(b) That no-one appears to have a complete picture of current fibre deployment
(c) That (in the Communications Day article of 18 March) “the way forward was to use current regulatory powers to ensure visibility of what we are selling and, failing that, a government mandate”.

Callpoint provides geospatial analysis services to the telco sector, and have undertaken analysis in the DSL, Fibre and Wireless Broadband spaces. In the case of fibre, we have worked with fibre route data provided by specific carriers. However, all these assignments have been under “commercial in confidence” and the source data cannot be re-used for any other purpose. The question I pose is “prior to any government mandate, is there a scenario where fibre carriers may be willing to provide their route data for mapping/ analysis?”
Possibly, if the carriers believed that doing so would help protect their fibre investments.

Given that existing carriers would shun any $7bn GovTelco deployment, a pitch to industry that highlighted how their cooperation would greatly assist policy development,
with the potential benefit of containing any GovTelco deployment to under-served areas, could gain momentum.

To help address industry’s obvious concerns, the results would be aggregated so that a single Australian fibre view would be created, sans references to individual carriers.

Kind regards, Brian Beckor
Principal Consultant, Callpoint
Geospatial services for telecoms
Ph: 03 9670 1212
info@callpoint.com.au