Telstra is a telecommunications giant in Australia that is already involved in a number of legal battles over its services. The Australian government seems to be gearing up to be added to the list of people waging legal war against the telecommunications firm. Recently, the government put out an ad seeking legal counsel for all things related to the Telstra network roll out and any related fields, including construction of the telecom lines and more.
Late last year, Paul Budde, a telecommunications expert, predicted the looming war between Telstra and Australia’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. speculation that abounds that only the top few Australian law firms will even be considered for the position due to the enormous legal scope it will encompass. No medium size law firm would have the resources to run such a major oversight operation.
The size of the law firm needed in fact posed a special problem for the government. The majority of Australia’s legal heavy hitters are already engaged with industry giant Telstra in various other legal battles. This means that taking a new contract with the government to fight its potential legal battles with Telstra would set them up for a variety of conflicts of interest at all levels of the legal process, in a variety of legal fields.
The first round of legal battles are expected to center around the issue of sub-loop unbundling, as discussed here:
“They’ll probably provide extensive scenario analysis,” said Ganz, who added that issues surrounding sub-loop unbundling — a form of unbundling where the local loop is handed over by Telstra to other operators outside of a telephone exchange — could cause the first legal storms to brew.
“There’s no precedent for what would take place if the government allowed that particular change to go through … so they need to make sure that the legal basis for this is sound, otherwise it could shelve all of their plans,” he said.
Unfortunately this is an issue with no room for any learning curve. Because of the scope of the network and the size of Telstra, in order to serve the people of Australia with alacrity in this matter the government will be under pressure to dot every i and cross every t right from the start, from picking the right legal representation for all aspects of the roll out to taking a firm hand in making sure the network is not sacrificed to the process itself.
