TPO is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which means it resells services that are based on another carrier's network. The company will launch in the United States in the next three months. "The jump from one market to two is bigger than the jump from the second to the third because of all the reconfiguring we've done it all becomes easier," he said. "After we get launched in the US we'll have to take a deep breath. "Once we're there we will be looking to other markets and within six months or a year we'll be hoping to launch somewhere else." He said the telco would decide on its next launch targets by November at the latest and had confidentially met with several telecommunications company chief executives during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. As an Australian carrier, TPO would have to abide by the government's plan to force all telcos to store the metadata of every phone and internet user for a minimum of two years.

This will see telcos record the callers and receivers of phone calls and emails, their duration, and the location of all parties at the time of the communications amongst other sets of information. This would be given to law enforcement bodies such as the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on demand without a warrant for their investigations. Mr Wales said he understood the need for data retention schemes in fighting crime. But he added law enforcement bodies should be forced to get warrants when seeking people's information. "With proper judicial oversight, probable cause, warrants, judges and not just police overseeing it, the ability to get access to information is perfectly valid," he said. "Warrantless systems really bother me because I think there's a real danger of them being abused and misused against people who haven't committed a crime. "In Russia the extent to which the government has access to everybody's phone records means that opposition leaders have all kinds of private information unfairly revealed to savage their chances [and] we shouldn't be naïve and assume that can't happen in our countries as well." He cited the McCarthy-era in the US as a time when "political misdeeds" were rife and said the risk of abuse was heightened by the fact that modern technology generated much more data.

Law enforcement bodies have said that demanding warrants for every request would grind the system to a halt, and a parliamentary inquiry has recommended the Commonwealth Ombudsman inspect records. But Mr Wales said this merely demonstrated the need for more legal resources. "Is there a need to invest in having more judges or a streamlined system? That's all up for play," he said. "But this idea that the police should just be able to troll through people's data without any oversight is just fundamentally wrong. It's a human rights violation." Mr Wales also said high-speed broadband was vital for future economies and that download and upload speeds of 1 gigabit per second would soon become the benchmark. Telcos in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore already offer the service. The national broadband network under Labor was technically capable of delivering broadband speeds of 1Gbps to premises connected with fibre optic cabling, but it would've required an upgrade to do so for the majority of end-users and cost them substantial fees. The speeds are more difficult to achieve under the Coalition's NBN, which aims to connect the vast majority of Australians to broadband speeds of 50 megabits per second. Some customers will get higher speeds thanks to fibre to the basement technology and upgrades to the hybrid-fibre coaxial (HFC) network currently used for Pay TV services, and cable broadband has the potential of reaching the target.

"Very fast broadband is important and it changes the way you can function online," he said. "There's a certain level, which is probably 6-15Mbps where you've got decent broadband, you can download movies, you can stream Netflix … you're functional. "Once I have both 150Mbps download and 150Mbps up – the upload is the interesting piece because now suddenly I'm able to back up my computer to the cloud [and] what happens when millions of people or hundreds of millions of people all have that kind of connectivity?" David Ramli travelled to Barcelona as a guest of Ericsson Follow us on Twitter @BusinessDay



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