Broadband prices competitive, unbundling not needed says Gattung

Theresa Gattung

Telecom chief executive Theresa Gattung is confident the company's new broadband packages are internationally competitive, and regulation in the form of local loop unbundling was not needed.

Miss Gattung said she wanted an independent body to benchmark the new packages.

"Because there is so much misinformation and there's a real risk that what we say is not believed," she told Newstalk ZB.

Earlier this week Telecom announced it was lowering prices and upgrading the speed of its broadband packages.

The next day the Prime Minister Helen Clark warned she was still unhappy about the price of broadband internet access and hinted at the need for regulation.

In her opening statement to Parliament for the year, Miss Clark said new initiatives were needed to get faster internet access at more competitive prices.

Ms Gattung said today that Telecom shared the Government's policy goal of affordable broadband for all New Zealanders.

She said Telecom had made a commitment to treat its wholesale customers, who are also Telecom's competitors, fairly.

"In the last six months our competitors got 50 per cent of the growth in the market. It is not true that we are a monopoly in this space."

One of the possible regulation routes the Government could go down is local loop unbundling, which would force Telecom to rent its copper lines network to other companies.

Ms Gattung said today there was already wholesale regulation in the market.

'To add unbundling on top of that is just going to completely confuse the signals to the market in terms of people investing capital."

In order to avoid local loop unbundling the Government set Telecom a target of signing up 250,000 new residential broadband customers by the end of last year, 83,000 of which were supposed to be wholesale connections.

While Telecom surpassed 250,000 connections, only 63,495 were wholesale connections, just 76.5 per cent of target.

- NZPA