KEY POINTS:
Our mobile and fixed-line telephone services stack up very poorly against similar products overseas, a Commerce Commission report released today reveals.
The Commission was reporting how the cost of New Zealand mobile and fixed line phone products compare internationally.
The best New Zealand service in the study could only muster a miserable 22nd place out of 30 surveyed.
The top-ranked mobile low-user plan in this country was Vodafone's Base 20, with a ranking of 22 out of 30, and an annual cost of $300 excluding GST.
Telecom's FLEXI Mytime was 26th with a cost of $336.
The commission added that the Base 20 plan had restrictive conditions, including a three-year contract term with heavy early termination penalties, no handset rebate and no international roaming. That was likely to make it unattractive to the vast majority of mobile users.
FLEXI Mytime had somewhat restrictive terms in that it was only available on a 24 month contract term.
Both Vodafone's Motormouth Prepay and Telecom's Go Prepaid Mates' Rates were ranked 28th with an annual cost of $387.
Among medium user mobile options Vodafone's Base 60 was the best performing of the New Zealand plans at 25th with an annual price of $598, but the commission repeated its comments about the plan being unattractive.
Vodafone's Choose 60 was 27th in the international rankings at $661 while Telecom's FLEXI Anytime was 29th at $811.
In mobile high user plans, Vodafone's Choose 120 was ranked 23rd among the international plans covered with an annual cost of $887. Telecom's FLEXI Anytime was 30th with a cost of $1369.
With fixed line residential high user plans, Telecom's Anytime plan was ranked 25th with a cost of $1450 for Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, and $1504 for the rest of the country.
Historically, New Zealand used to rank better in residential comparisons if call volumes were increased because local calls in this country were "free", while in most countries they were charged for on a per call or time basis, the commission said.
But while the OECD had introduced a high user basket with a higher volume of local calls, it also had a higher volume of fixed-to-mobile calls, which were relatively expensive for Telecom's residential customers in particular.
The Commerce Commission added a warning with the report today.
"It is difficult to accurately measure how prices faced by telecommunications end-users are moving over time because of changing buyer behaviour, changing products and complex tariffs like capped calling," the commission said in the first of a new series of quarterly telecommunications reports.
Most figures the commission does use in the key statistics report are "indicative only and need to be interpreted with caution".
That is partly because the figures are based on work done by Teligen for the OECD to compare the costs of telecommunications services in different companies.
So the standard consumption baskets, reflecting different telecommunications end-user profiles, used in the figures will be different from New Zealand customer profiles. They also did not capture special or confidential deals, the commission said.
The data used in the report, indicating how New Zealand compares against other OECD countries, is for November.
The commission said today's report, covering the December quarter, was the first of an intended series of quarterly monitoring reports using readily available key statistics about telecommunications markets in this country and overseas.
A more comprehensive set of statistics, commentary and analysis of New Zealand's telecommunications markets was planned to be presented in an annual state of the market report.
- NZPA, NZHERALD STAFF
