It’s that time of year again where CommsDay founder Grahame Lynch takes a look at back at year of issues to judge his 15 Australian telecom people of the year.

1—Communications minister Stephen Conroy
Another extraordinary year from this endlessly fascinating minister. Started the year with a shaky FTTN tender, finished it in the seemingly box position to compel Telstra to populate a national FTTH network with its enormous fixed network traffic. Could he go down as the greatest comms minister in history? There are still plenty of sceptics who think that the NBN will be mugged by economic reality but Conroy has shown a formidable talent for pulling rabbits from hats: his separation bill, for example, was an amazing example of how to use implied legislative power to effect a desired outcome. Managed to keep Internet filtering out of the headlines until the very end of the year when the gallery was either in Copenhagen or on vacation. But as much as the NBN and the filtering policy polarise the industry they likely play well in the wider electorate — something lobbyists and critics could do well to remember.

2—Optus CEO Paul O’Sullivan
Paul O’Sullivan doesn’t earn this spot for his headline-grabbing ability — he is a mostly reclusive CEO who told us more in one newspaper story this month about his life than he has in the previous 15 years combined. But O’Sullivan has scored the coup of the decade in cleverly influencing the alignment of the perceived national interest and the political interests of Labor with those of Optus. One observer describes Optus lobbying that led to the NBN and separation reforms as the most perfectly executed campaign he has seen. Not that you will see Optus boasting about that or indeed anything. Optus could be regarded as easily the most successful no 2 or challenger integrated telco in the world. Memo to Singapore: this man really justifies a bonus this year.

3—Telstra CEO David Thodey
There is absolutely no doubt that Thodey has stamped his own style on Telstra in his short time as CEO and there is no illusion about what he seeks to achieve — he wants to re-invent Telstra’s reputation as an aloof, insensitive provider and achieve customer service excellence. Given predecessor Sol Trujillo received extensive raps from competitors for his re-invention of Telstra’s core systems and marketing platforms, a dramatically improved service performance could finish the job and revitalise its market share—especially if Thodey decides to take competitors on with price cuts. With several senior legacy execs such as Holly Kramer and David Moffatt leaving, Thodey is also now beginning to shape his own team.

4— Professor Rod Tucker, Expert Panellist
It’s hard to nominate an individual who has had more influence on the telecom sector’s future than this immensely likable fibre systems academic. As an expert panellist, Tucker was the key person to say, hang on, the FTTN plan doesn’t make sense, FTTH is the real solution. Hence a “revolution” in the making was forged — in partnership with protégé Kate Cornick in the minister’s office and now re-united with her at the Institute for Broadband Enabled Society where Tucker is playing a key role in developing the applications and services of the future.

5—David Teoh, TPG CEO
David Teoh has established himself as the man to watch in telecoms for 2010. His audacious takeover bid for Pipe suggests he wants to grow TPG into a large integrated telco to rival the big three—Telstra, Optus and Telecom NZ/AAPT. His pervasive marketing activity is creating some new price points for the DSL market: effectively unlimited data at the $50 mark. And anecdotal evidence suggests that TPG is signing up even more customers than Big Pond and Optus currently. The big question is how it all comes out in the wash as DSL markets effectively saturate and $40 becomes the new $50. Many rivals are sceptical of Teoh but he has a habit of proving them all wrong.

6—Mike Quigley, NBN Co
If telecoms is an unusually politicised industry, imagine being the chief of a telco that reports to politicians. Quigley himself appears to relish his role as a great opportunity to build a dream network from scratch but others might see the task as thankless in the light of the fury and dust that the NBN policy has stirred. Quigley has rapidly impressed even the most staunch NBN critics with the dignity he has brought to the job — particularly in limited public appearances where he has calmly and clearly explained the still embryonic NBN plans. His new management team appear carefully selected and, likewise, are impressing those who deal with them.

7—Senator Nick Minchin, former shadow comms minister
Nick Minchin’s 2009 will be remembered for his part in the machinations that saw the change of leadership in the Liberal party but he also played an extremely influential role in telecoms, using his pulpit and credibility as a former finance minister to question the economics of the NBN. While many in the industry support the NBN vision, Minchin’s focus on the lack of soundings and costings of the policy clearly resonated — by the end of the year even the government’s strongest NBN supporters were articulating their own ideas about how the project should be funded or constructed that belied the government’s bullishness on its economic case. Minchin was held in a degree of contempt by Conroy for an apparent lack of policy and many in the sector thought him aloof from and uninterested in positive reform. He is no longer the shadow, but he will continue to play a high profile in Senate deliberations over telecoms in the new year.

8—iiNet CEO Michael Malone
As one of the original standard bearers for competition in Australia, Malone spent considerable time in court rooms this year doing something he clearly would preferred to have avoid—being made the “example” for the allegedly lax practices of ISPs in enforcing intellectual property rights. The outcome of that court case will have enormous national and international implications which means that Malone is under one helluva lot of industry pressure. Verdict to come in 2010.

9—PIPE Networks’ Bevan Slattery
Like suitor David Teoh, Pipe’s Slattery was written off by many as his PPC-1 project looked to become a casualty of the global financial crisis. But he pulled the plan off and lo and behind, Australia now has a genuinely game-changing piece of infrastructure, developed outside the fold of the established incumbent telcos. Slattery also earns raps for another reason: his willingness to challenge authority and convention. In an industry that embarrassingly falls over itself to fall in behind authority—witness the telco press releases on filtering this week — Slattery has been prepared to challenge things such as the network information disclosure requirements. A genuine individual in an industry that is all too often excessively conformist.

10—Anne Hurley, Communications Alliance
Is the most thankless job in telecoms being the person who has to convince Telstra, Optus, iiNet, Primus, VHA etcetera etcetera to sit down in a room together and talk like adults? I suspect so. Hurley is soon to retire from Comms Alliance but did a sterling job this year of holding together an organisation that was under much strain as industry emotions heated up over competition and commercial practices. One of Hurley’s big achievements this year was to pounce on the NBN announcement and quickly focus her group on discussing the nitty gritty tech detail that needs to be sorted out for the idea to fly. As NBN Co itself has acknowledged, Comms Alliance has provided invaluable input into planning the next generation of services.

11– Henry Ergas, economist
Was there a more maligned man in telecoms this year? Ergas was soundly condemned when he presented initial costings of the NBN that were extremely unflattering of its economics, but few made the effort to recant or apologise as other financial, stock and industry analysts came out with their own bearish predictions for the likely commercial returns of FTTH. The Federal government quite enjoyed gloating over Ergas’ personal misfortune as the economic consultancy he chaired went into voluntary administration– clearly it doesn’t pay to become a professional critic. But Ergas’ original costings set the tone for the biggest telecom debate of the year—will the NBN really turn out the way the government promises?

12– Doug Campbell, Tasmanian NBN Co
It was just a short time ago that Campbell was heading up Countrywide at Telstra, apparently in the twilight of a very successful career. Not even the most prescient fortune teller would have guessed that in double quick time he would be a) driving a left field bid against Telstra for the right to build FTTN and b) heading up an effort by the Tasmanian government to build a most ambitious state-wide FTTH network. I say ambitious because while it’s one thing to build fibre in downtown Tokyo and Seoul, Tasmania — with its difficult topography and economics — is another challenge altogether. And although few want to admit it, Tasmania is almost serving as a form of international “canary” for public policy designed to deliver FTTH to the rest of us.

13– Nigel Dews, CEO VHA
A quiet year in public for Dews, no doubt because he was undergoing an extremely busy year internally shepherding the merger of Vodafone Australia and Hutchison. It’s way too early for the jury to report but if Dews pulls it off he will have truly earned a formidable reputation and could be destined for even bigger and better things. It’s astonishing how little of the usual noise that emanates from inside mergers such as this has taken place with VHA.

14—Graeme Samuel, ACCC chairman
A very odd year for the ACCC supremo. Has as much reason as Optus to feel vindicated by government policy actions this year with separation and open access infrastructure square on the national agenda. But the ACCC may have been too clever by half in tweaking its pricing deliberations to make them more NBN friendly, in part by apparently acceding to Telstra criticisms of its cost model and the old Phil Burgess line that the regulator was undermining government policy intentions. That the ACCC spectacularly backflipped from this and reverted to the status quo raised enormous doubts about its credibility among former fans.

15—Kerry Stokes, media entrepreneur
In a world where all good telcos are racing to be under the umbrella of mother NBN, it was relieving to see at least one entrepreneur have a go at building their own infrastructure. A WiMAX network in Perth may be a modest start, but it not only provides some form of competitive differentiation but will also provide an interesting case study on whether content companies should play in connectivity.

On the bench: There were a few more people worthy of note this year who were unlucky not to make the
final cut. They include ACCAN’s Allan Asher, the TIO’s Deirdre O’Donnell, Senator Kate Lundy, AAPT’s
Paul Broad and Tasmanian premier David Bartlett.