However, Chorus apparently intends to go ahead with its new Boost VDSL service and is holding a presentation for ISPs and telcos next week, which is curious given that it doesn't really appear to offer anything over and above the regulated product.
We'll see how it pans out. Chorus told me that the regulated service won't have traffic management or the 250kbps handover limitation which it wanted to impose before.
The Commerce Commission confirmed this, but added that it had been told Chorus won't limit current services until April 1 next year.
Does that mean today's announcement is just a relatively short respite before the silliness starts again?
Would rather not trade again
It had to happen some time: a bad Trade Me experience.
Briefly, I bought some things and paid with a credit card, as instructed by Trade Me, and ended up with lots of phone calls and emails as well as a concerned seller.
Here's the deal: if you buy something worth more than $500, Trade Me will manually verify the buyer's credit card. Before that has happened, the payment isn't released.
That doesn't sound too bad, but they do it by applying a small, $1 charge to your card, and then you have to quote them the last four numbers and letters of the transaction from your bank statement.
The small charge never happened according to the bank, and no transaction was recorded. In other words, we were stuck with Trade Me repeatedly asking for the code that we didn't have and the payment not reaching the seller.
Part of the problem, although it was never confirmed by Trade Me, is that I bought the things for someone else and paid with that person's credit card - I can see that that would set off a warning.
At the same time, I would have thought that explaining it to Trade Me and having them speak to the other person would be enough to allay doubts.
Why is there is such a byzantine procedure in place for credit card charges on Trade Me?
Who knows; maybe Trade Me has huge amounts of fraud to deal with?
Either way, there's no warning that you'll have to jump through heaps of hoops while Trade Me essentially suspects you of credit card fraud by default.
The seller in question was also understandably worried, and I thought this would lead to some severely negative feedback on Trade Me for me.
Now, Trade Me's customer service people were quick to respond and courteous as well.
Also, don't get me wrong, I appreciate safety measures - there's more than enough fraud as it is.
What grinds my gears however is that resolving the relatively simple issue was so difficult.
First, Trade Me calls you from blocked phone numbers and make no attempt to identify you so you don't know if you're dealing with the real thing or scammers.
If you want to be more secure and call them back you have go through an 0900 number that costs an extortionate $1.99 a minute plus GST!
Second, because I didn't want to keep the seller waiting and risk bad feedback, I offered to pay via bank funds transfer and cancel the credit card payment.
Imagine my surprise then when Trade Me told the seller not to give out bank details and refused to cancel the credit card charge. Incidentally, Trade Me wants $20 per charge for credit card payments, the seller told me.
At this stage, I had had enough and wanted to cancel my Trade Me account. That's fine, but I had to pay an administration fee of $5 to do that (which in fairness Trade Me offered to waive after I kvetched about it).
In the end the payment went through the following day. Honestly though, if I had known it would be this awkward, I would not have tried to buy the things on Trade Me.
While I admire Trade Me's success and appreciate their quick response in my case, the above points to the online retail giant having become a monopoly that's comfortable introducing fees everywhere, and unhelpful bureaucracy to boot.
This is not a good thing. Trade Me badly needs competition and New Zealand consumers an alternative for online trading urgently.
