It began life in Au as "Pay TV". One early operator used MDS but it turned out that cable was better in enough ways. We never had the same situation as created the early cable system in the US.

Instead, market forces were artificial and some extremely expensive mistakes were made. As a result, most of Australia's urban areas have two cable networks to choose from, Foxtel (run by Telstra) and OptusVision. The problem with this is that the owner of the infrastructure owns the programming system, too. Bad mistake, IMHO. I reckon if Optus really want to spike Telstra, they would sell their cable network in neighbourhood sized pieces and sell them content packages.

Wade.