Broadband Warriors: Untangling our phone lines

To understand unbundling it's necessary to have a picture of your phone wires inside a telephone exchange. But when you first see the racks and racks of copper wires everywhere - at once ordered in the confines of blocks and tangled in seeming chaos as they spill out the other side - it's impossible to believe anyone could find anything.

But that's exactly what unbundling involves - finding your Telecom wires and connecting them to a competitor's equipment which is housed in the exchange. Unbundling hasn't happened in New Zealand yet, but it is an option under consideration in the Government's "stocktake" of telecommunications regulation.

But it is already in place in Australia and Britain. In the North Sydney exchange, for example, you can see racks of perforated white blocks and the tangled strands of green tie-wires that reroute Telstra's copper wires from the main distribution frame to a locked interconnect room. There, tall beige and grey cabinets of the competition - Optus, Primus, Request and even Telecom's Australian arm AAPT - stand like sentinels amid the hum of air-conditioners and electronics guarding their hard-won cargo.

It's worth noting that new telephone exchanges are quite different from the large buildings that once housed toll operators. Most are compact roadside cabinets that gather together smaller numbers of copper wires from houses in a street or neighbourhood. The much shorter lengths of copper wire are essential for faster broadband speeds.