Telecom to announce network sale today?

The Dom Post (which often gets very accurate leaks from Telecom) predicts that today the Government and Telecom will announce at 9 am that after their three way split into network, wholesale, the network division will be sold off as a separate company.

No details yet but I suspect the trade off for Telecom is a less rigourous regime between their wholesale and retail arms, in exchange for the sale of the bottleneck network and access section.

The devil will be in the detail but in principle I have been a long term advocate of structural separation.  This could be very exicting.  If done well the network company could become a Transpower type national grid on which a fibre to the home infrastructure could be built.

Hilarious related scene on TV One Breakfast as the business correspondent stated (twice) that Telecom had said they need to employ 700 million extra staff to cope with the split.  Paul and Pippa were in tears of laughter as they teased him over whether Telecom really will need to employ the entire population of the US and Europe.