It’s been a big year for the Australian telecommunications sector and the list of achievements looks impressive.

Telstra has signed off on structural separation in a deal that the government believes will underpin the success of the NBN, whilst the NBN has been provided with all the legislative support it needs and is, according to the government, making real progress having started commercial services on the mainland.

Given the scale of the structural changes that have marked the last year it was to be expected that industry players would pause and plan for the future but its perhaps not so much the promised changes under the NBN that are causing many in the industry to now stop and think but the back to the future developments of recent months. Whilst the industry may sit on the edge of a new competitive era both the Australian Communications and Media Authority and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission seem intent on hanging on to tried and tested regulatory tools.

In the second half of the year ACMA questioned the effectiveness of self regulation and warned they will regulate if industry codes don’t address concerns they hold in areas such as complaints handling and customer service. The ACCC, which had already caused considerable disquiet with its NBN point of interconnect decision which many believe favours Telstra, appears to have balanced the ledger by taking a swipe at the incumbent as the year closes. The ACCC has reregulated a raft of wholesale voice services and is considering declaring a wholesale ADSL service including ADSL2 .

The readiness of regulators to go back to tried and tested regulatory practice, especially regulation of access to Telstra copper suggests that despite the year’s developments there is considerable uncertainty about the timing of the changes that the NBN will actually bring. As the NBN company has become more transparent about the progress on its rollout by publishing monthly and yearly schedules, it has become obvious that progress on the NBN may fall short of that promised. December’s monthly rollout update reveals that only a further 6000 brownfield premises will be passed by mid 2012 and only 7800 greenfield premises appear certain to be completed by the middle of next year.

That would leave the NBN with only 10% of its cumulative mid 2012 target – not quite the progress the government would have hoped for. Similarly Telstra’s structural separation may not be the ‘holy grail’ of telecommunications reform that the Minister Stephen Conroy claims and as the year ends and the ACCC mulls over finally signing off on the undertaking Telstra’s competitors have the right to feel cheated by what is actually being delivered.

Just how quickly Telstra ‘s vertical integration can be unwound is utterly dependent upon the speed of the NBN rollout but even if vertical integration is ultimately addressed the undertaking does absolutely nothing to address what is perhaps the real structural shortcoming in the industry – Telstra’s control of cable TV and the resultant horizontal integration that gives it access to content. Given the likely significance of the triple play to ISPs’ success on the NBN, access to content is all important and nothing has been done to address this problem.

Indeed in sharp contrast to the swift and decisive outcome in New Zealand, Telstra may never be separated and the agenda driven by Telstra’s competitors, led by Optus, may never be realised. This is especially so given that in one of the key moves of the year Maha Krishnapillai arguably the sector’s most influential and successful lobbyists has left Optus.

The year also saw the end of another era in the campaign for deregulation, with the winding up of the Australian Telecommunication Users Group. ATUG, which was often a voice of considered reason in the all too often heated debate about deregulation, will be missed.

In a sense 2011 marks full circle for the mission ATUG set out on more than 25 years ago – arguing for liberalisation of a government monopoly that limited private sector investment in the sector. 2011 has seen a fair bit of that monopoly reassembled – 2012 may tell us whether that monopoly can endure.