This chaotic broadband rollout has created a vast digital divide between Australia's haves and have-nots. It's not just a divide between the cities and the country, it's a divide which exists within suburbs and even within streets. The quality of your home and business internet connection is basically pot luck depending on how Telstra's monopolistic behaviour has impacted on the available infrastructure and choice of providers.

A case in point, my next door neighbour is hooked up to 100 Mbps HFC cable but I'm stuck on a wavering 5 Mbps ADSL2+ connection – a speed which actually makes me one of the lucky ones in this country. As a city dweller it's easy to forget that some homes are lucky to get 1 or 2 Mbps depending on the quality of the copper line and their distance from the exchange. Some homes are actually still stuck on dial-up thanks to infrastructure bottlenecks which current market forces and regulation have failed to address.

Australia's current broadband infrastructure is the equivalent of running a mix of bitumen, gravel and dirt roads through every suburb in the country and then letting Holden decide which cars can drive on which roads. The haphazard quality of Australia's broadband infrastructure is hampering potential high-speed services which require a critical mass of users to be viable. Meanwhile Telstra has continually abused its power to hinder competitors – from restricting their access to telephone exchanges to deliberately dropping its retail prices below its wholesale prices.

The real blame for this mess doesn't actually lie with Telstra. It lies with politicians and regulators who created an environment in which Telstra could abuse its power. Blame falls on both sides of politics and it goes back at least as far as the refusal to separate Telecom into retail and wholesale arms. Instead our politicians left the country's biggest telecommunications retailer in charge of the nation's infrastructure and then invited competitors to play by Telstra's rules.

The decision to build a fibre-to-the-home network was not simply a technical decision to bypass the copper network, it was more of a business decision to cut Telstra out of the picture. Sol Trujillo made it painfully clear that Telstra couldn't be trusted to own and operate the NBN and share it fairly with competitors. This would simply replicate the existing problems. So an entirely new network was proposed, relegating Telstra to the role of retailer while NBN Co acted as wholesaler and offered equal access to all internet service providers. We'd finally have what Telstra feared most: a level playing field.