When Telstra CEO Vicki Brady took to the podium at the National Press Club in September 2025, she declared:
This kind of urgency might seem refreshing from a telco chief, but for those of us who have spent decades advocating for a long-term vision in digital infrastructure, it’s also deeply ironic. Many of us remember the years Telstra spent actively undermining that very future—resisting FTTH, blocking competitors, and failing to prepare for the inevitable demise of copper.
As I wrote in my June piece, I had a televised exchange with Telstra executive Ted Pretty around the year 2000. When I raised concerns about Telstra’s direction, he shot back: “So you want Telstra to be involved in dumb pipes?” I replied, “No, Ted—intelligent pipes.” Today, Telstra claims to finally be building those pipes. But if Brady’s speech is anything to go by, the company still doesn’t fully understand what intelligent infrastructure actually means—especially when it comes to national interest.
The NBN-shaped hole in Telstra’s grand vision
Brady’s speech was titled “A Shared National Vision for Australia’s Digital Future”, yet it made no mention of the National Broadband Network—the largest digital infrastructure project in Australia’s history. No reference to the Fibre Connect upgrades, no acknowledgment of the public investment in the “last mile,” and certainly no gratitude for the foundation on which Telstra’s own services ride.
Instead, the vision seems focused on Telstra’s own fibre backbone, enterprise-grade products, mobile data infrastructure, and data centre facilities. What’s missing is a commitment to universal service. What Brady presented was a corporate strategy masquerading as national vision—a set of talking points aimed at investors and regulators, not citizens.
A vision built on ROI, not digital rights
Telstra’s “Connected Future 30” strategy, which I explored in June, is based on turning the network into a modular, programmable product. Latency, speed, jitter, and other attributes become pricing levers. That’s fine—in fact, it’s overdue. But the fundamental danger remains: when connectivity is framed only in terms of return on equity, the public good gets lost.
As one long-time colleague pointed out to me after the speech:
“In the 21st century, the right to connect is as fundamental as the right to vote. It’s the digital equivalent of universal suffrage.”
That right—access to reliable, affordable connectivity—was the entire premise of the NBN. Brady’s remarks instead suggest a shift back to tiered service offerings and market segmentation. The platform may be programmable, but will it be equitable?
The lessons Telstra refuses to learn
We’ve been here before. In the early 1990s, Australia already had an inter-exchange fibre network. Mel Ward, Frank Blount, and even CSIRO engineers were talking about the coming data explosion and the inevitability of fibre. A 1995 Telstra strategy paper reportedly warned that:
“Revenue from voice services on Telstra’s copper wire network would be zero by 2010.”
Yet the company didn’t act on it. Instead, it poured resources into maintaining monopolies, stifling competitors like Optus, and killing off alternative infrastructure models like HFC and VoIP.
What followed were decades of stagnation, capped off by Telstra doing everything it could to block or dilute the NBN—only to now repackage much of that original vision as its own.
Hyperscalers, Cisco, and history repeating
Brady is right to identify the threat posed by hyperscalers. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are indeed bypassing telcos, building their own cables and edge infrastructure. But this isn’t new. The tech world has been moving in this direction since the first VoIP deployments on CSIRO’s networks in the late 1990s—something Cisco used as a global testbed.
The difference is that these companies learned to build platforms, not just infrastructure. Telstra is trying to adopt their language—“network-as-a-product,” “agentic AI,” “API-first”—but without the culture or agility that underpins genuine platform economics.
What Telstra could have said—and still can
Instead of promoting another ROI-driven roadmap, Telstra had the opportunity to lead a truly national conversation. It could have called for a connectivity charter—one that enshrines access to broadband as a social and economic right. It could have pushed for a whole-of-nation fibre strategy, one that integrates private networks with public infrastructure like the NBN.
Instead, we got lobbying dressed as vision.
Still, all is not lost. Telstra is a critical player, and Brady is not wrong when she says we are at an inflection point. But if Telstra wants to be taken seriously as a national leader, it must broaden its lens beyond its own revenue models.
This means working with—rather than ignoring—the NBN. It means committing to affordable, ubiquitous access as a core principle, not just a regulatory hurdle. And it means recognising that Australia’s digital future will not be delivered by infrastructure alone, but by the values we encode into it.
Paul Budde