Top 20 Stephen Conroy memories and milestones

10. Big Red Button

Stephen Conroy and Kevin Rudd in happier times.

The button started life as a piece of software targeting school children. It hovered above applications to allow children to click on it and report uncomfortable online situations.

The concept morphed into something else during Conroy's tenure, with a big red button making repeated appearances at various go-live events for the national broadband network.

(From Left: NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley, ACT Senator Kate Lundy and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy switch on the NBN in Gungahlin in Canberra. Photo courtesy: Kate Lundy)

9. Set high price on digital dividend spectrum... and didn't sell it all

Conroy outraged mobile telcos when he set a reserve price of $1.36 per megahertz per population for auction lots of 700 MHz spectrum. The price was well above the most optimistic estimates of financial analysts, and resulted in some criticism that it was "unworkable". In the end, not all of the spectrum sold at auction, netting less money for the Government than Conroy had anticipated.

8. Structural separation ultimatum

Conroy will undoubtedly claim Telstra's structural separation as a major victory of his tenure as Communications Minister — and it was a victory achieved in part by some hardball played by the Minister. In short, Telstra was told it could not bid for the 'waterfront' 700 MHz and 2.5 GHz digital dividend spectrum if it stayed vertically integrated, which would have seriously inhibited its future LTE network. As one article put it, "Conroy makes Telstra an offer it can't refuse".

7. Going it alone on NBN

Conroy's most positive legacy is the $43 billion National Broadband Network, though it may not have been executed as fast as he or other advocates might have hoped. The decision to scrap NBN mark 1 and go it alone on the construction of the network was a major milestone of Conroy's reign as Communications Minister. Arguably he's had a pretty good crack at kicking some early goals — its popularity and soaring take-up rates ultimately forced the Coalition to abandon thoughts of demolishing the network, as they had initially pledged. Its future remains uncertain post-election, though Labor will be hoping the change of prime minister can give NBN Co another three years to get on with the job.

6. Stop the cherry-pickers

Conroy drove a myriad of legislation through parliament to set the regulatory framework for the operation of the NBN, though few pieces proved as controversial as the anti-cherry picking provisions. Pricing for the NBN is averaged, meaning metropolitan areas subsidise access costs in regional and rural parts of Australia. The Government and its advisors feared that carriers other than NBN Co might try to deploy their own superfast networks "in high-income and low-cost, high-density areas and then undercut NBN Co's average price due to the lack of any need to subsidise operations in higher-cost areas".

The answer was to draft laws to the effect that no company may build or operate a network that competes directly with NBN Co for customers.

The proposed laws predictably caused outrage. They were later watered down slightly to exclude backhaul network providers as well as fibre builders that serviced only corporate and government clients. Both groups were previously considered to be collateral damage.

The laws passed but some problems remain. iiNet had to seek variations to cherry-picking exceptions in order to cut the price of FTTP services on the TransACT network (which it has since sold to NBN Co.)

Read on for iTnews' top five memories and milestones of Conroy's tenure.