Mobile rivals squabbling over numbers

By RICHARD BRADDELL

Vodafone New Zealand has rejected Telecom's claims to have recovered market share in the mobile market after being heavily outgunned in the past year.

Last week Telecom released research it commissioned which showed that the company's share of mobile customers, phones and spending had risen 3 to 4 percentage points in the September quarter to two-thirds of the market or more in each category.

The jump arrests a steady decline over the preceding four quarters which also corresponds with a five-fold increase in market penetration by Vodafone.

However, Vodafone chief executive John Rohan pointed to actual connection figures, with his company picking up a net 76,000 new connections against 51,000 for Telecom in the September quarter.

He dismissed Telecom's suggestion that straight connection data may produce an inaccurate picture because of possible accounting differences.

Vodafone and Telecom had the same policy of considering prepaid customers disconnected if they were inactive for six months, Mr Rohan said.

The research also said that Telecom now ranks ahead of Vodafone in customer trust, value for money, fixing problems and showing the future of telecommunications.

But Mr Rohan said that while Telecom's market research showed an improvement, that might be due to a quirk in the sampling, perhaps due to an unusual weighting in favour of Telecom in a particular region.

He also rejected Telecom claims that its new digital CDMA cellular network, to be commissioned next April or May, will give it a two-year technological advantage.

Mr Rohan said an upgrade of Vodafone's GSM digital network in January would provide comparable voice quality to CDMA.

Vodafone was well qualified to comment on both systems since it operated GSM networks in Europe and CDMA in the US.

In user testing, opinion was evenly divided as to whether CDMA or enhanced GSM provided the best voice, he said.

The difference was that Vodafone's enhanced voice would be available several months earlier than Telecom's CDMA.

As to the claimed speed advantage CDMA had over GSM in mobile data and internet, Mr Rohan said the 144 kb/s touted for CDMA was a peak rate rather than an average rate and depended on there being only a few callers on the network.