After the bids are lodged in November the Rudd Government’s seven member expert panel will consider the tender documents and make a recommendation to the Government around February. Following this Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, with the assistance of the Communications Department, will finalise a recommendation for Cabinet which will then make the final decision.

It’s all very well to talk up co-operative industrial relations but if one party, in this case Telstra, a very big and powerful employer with a massive amount of market share, does not want to co-operate, you won’t get where you want to go. It takes more than good intentions, gently delivered.

Telstra is trying to leave two-thirds of its workforce on Australian Workplace Agreements indefinitely. If successful, thousands of the telco’s employees will be employed under John Howard’s individual contract regime well into a second term of the Rudd government - and beyond.

After months of silence on the issue — during which Optus has continued its campaign to win the $4.7 billion national broadband contract — the Optus CEO revealed yesterday his team was in contact with Futuris’s new leadership and close to making a decision on whether to pursue court action.

The high page count stems from Optus and Telstra unnecessarily itemising each individual piece of web data downloaded using the phone, instead of having a single usage figure for each day. One customer estimated that if he had used his full 850MB allowance his bill would have been more than 80 pages.

While Telstra remains the most expensive Australian mobile carrier, the mobile broadband price cut is the most significant change since it activated the Next G network almost 22 months ago. Telstra has previously defended its lofty costs on the basis of a “premium” product, because Next G was faster and offered bigger coverage.