The federal government has faced criticism from the industry that the NBN tender documents are too vague to ensure the network will be open-access and pro-competitive. Telstra has said it will bow out of the NBN process if structural separation is enforced.

"It doesn't make any sense and it hasn't worked anywhere in the world. In reality the opposite is true - separation has done nothing but grind investment and innovation to a halt. This view is supported by experts around the world. Wherever separation has been toyed with, it has increased costs, reduced efficiencies and brought investment in high-speed broadband infrastructure to a virtual standstill - not the least in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand.

The G9 (Terria) consortium also copped flak when Burgess suggested they should be more worried about their own separation than Telstra's.

"G9 which is now G8 or G7 and recently rebadged itself as Terria is Exhibit A, and the Optus/Opel consortium that lost nearly a billion dollars of government money because it couldn't produce a wireless infrastructure plan is Exhibit B.

"Unfortunately, this exercise has simply provided a forum for all of Telstra's competitors to present the Government with a wish-list to win through a political process what they cannot win in the marketplace - a familiar story."

Acacia were also singled out by Telstra, which accused them of wanting to "ban all broadband competition including wireless networks".

Google, another vocal proponent of functional or structural separation of Telstra, copped a final serve:

"Google, not even an access seeker, just wants free access to bandwidth from a network that will cost billion of dollars to build."