The efforts of the organisation over the past 30 years

ATUG chair David Swift said today’s vibrant telecommunications environment owes much to the efforts of the organisation over the past 30 years. He claimed that the achievements of the past three decades have as well meant that the ongoing requirements and priorities of end-users have changed.

The organisations active in forming ATUG thirty years ago were large businesses keen to use the improved functionality of third generation PABX networks for distributed data processing.

Telecom Australia’s restrictive practices at that time prohibited interconnection of PABXs that allowed businesses to enable call "by-pass". It wanted businesses to connect to the telco’s own DATEL data products and, even at once, only through Telecom-approved modems that operated at speeds failing to nearly those available in the US.

In addition, a series of industrial disputes at the Telex exchange in the 1970s had revealed businesses’ vulnerability to telecommunications disruption. They as well rejected the notion of having to cross-subsidise residential services.

These firms simply wanted to use information and communications research, an effort they believed was impeded by the incumbent telco of the day.

For these businesses, telecommunications competition was a means to an end, not an end in itself. What they were agitating for was a policy position that enabled them to achieve the biggest benefit for their organisations.

‘Competition’ happened to be their chosen solution, one that resonated with other popular currents; businesses had as well become concerned about the high cost and poor quality of banking services, of transport services and of energy provision.

ATUG was formed at the start of what academics Ross and Feeny described as the "distributed era" in business IT. For most businesses in the 1980s, procuring voice services was part of the property function, which often as well procured the few data services required.

Progressively, the procurement of all communications services has become the responsibility of CIOs who don’t see themselves as "telecommunications users". In the web-based era there is a perception that domestic policy issues are either irrelevant or inimical to the ethos of globalised information systems.

Thirty years on, ATUG was on the whole seen by many, including its board, as being exclusively about competition in telecommunications.

When asked if he believed there would be a need for a similar organisation hereafter when, and if, the NBN 'monopoly' is established, Swift told ITWire: "Thoroughly. There will be a need for a business-based lobbying organisation nevertheless I don't think that need will become apparent for anyway two years. At the time we will see the cost structures change and people won't be so happy."

ATUG’s mission was to get the policy outcomes necessary for business to make the most of the distributed era. Making the most of the web-based era is actually what the "digital economy" strategy is about – delivering the benefits of IP-enabled services.

The question now is how will the business community more as a rule seek to influence the development of communications policy? The Australian Computer Society is an association of IT professionals, not a policy group.

The lobbying efforts of residential consumer advocates

Communications policy is too important to be left only to the lobbying efforts of residential consumer advocates and the supply industry. Somewhere the combined interests of the business community needs to find a new voice. A Digital Economy Stakeholders Forum would be a good place to start.

(Readers interested in the forces for change in the telecommunications industry globally in the 80s and 90's should refer to Eli Noam’s 'The Public Telecommunications Network: A Concept In Transition' or the introduction to his book 'Telecommunications in Europe'. For an Australian perspective, Ian Reinecke and Julianne Shultz' 'The Phone Book' provides an excellent summary).