Telecom given a bruising

The sixth annual Telecommunications & ICT Summit in Auckland yesterday was marked by a good deal of anti-Telecom sentiment.

After brief introductory comments from Australian Communications Industry Forum chief executive Anne Hurley, Telecommunications Commissioner Douglas Webb took the podium and gave Telecom a tongue-lashing.

Webb said Telecom had thus far not reacted well to regulation in the area of broadband internet offerings, and had been extraordinarily "defensive".

The company had worked hard to meet the demands of regulators, "but it works equally hard to not deliver anything" outside of those demands.

Telecom's attitude "ignores the needs" of the wholesale market, and had effectively "crippled" it.

Webb expanded his criticism to parts of Communications Minister David Cunliffe's recently announced Digital Strategy.

The plan calls for a drastic improvement of New Zealand's OECD ranking for broadband uptake, from 22nd out of 30 to the upper half by 2007, and the upper quartile by 2010.

Without Telecom's co-operation in wholesaling, those are unrealistic plans.

"On our present trajectory, there is no chance New Zealand will achieve those goals," Webb said.

Bruce Parkes, Telecom's general manager of government and industry relations, also said the OECD ranking goal was unreasonable.

"The top quartile is going to be a busy place if everybody [who wants to be there] gets there," Parkes said.

Telecom faces several problems in improving broadband uptake. New Zealand wasn't a wealthy country, he said, and did not rank in the top quartile in gross domestic product, so it was harder to get customers to spend more.

Migrating dial-up customers to broadband was also difficult when the dial-up products offered were good, he said.

Parkes took issue with Webb's recent recommendation that the Government regulate the cost of landline-to-cell-phone calls, also known as mobile termination rates. The recommendation suggested that 3G networks be exempt from regulation so as to not discourage investment, but it does not consider Telecom's 027 network as 3G.

Parkes qualified Telecom's network as "a risky investment", and the recommendation is thus "perverse". The investment has allowed Telecom to take the technological lead in mobiles over rival Vodafone.

For that, Telecom likens itself to the underdog All Blacks, while Vodafone are the big, bad Lions - an analogy that drew snickers from several members of the audience.

Slingshot director Annette Presley, wearing a portable microphone, livened up the proceedings with a multimedia presentation looking at where New Zealand's telecoms industry will be in 10 years.

Presley began with a number of fanciful predictions, including free voice calls, intelligent fridges that warn owners when they are running low on beer, and healthy competition between telcos.

But she soon launched into criticism of the Government, saying it was "really sad that we don't have [a good regulator] today".

"Things have to change," she said. "If we keep doing what we've been doing, we'll keep getting what we've been getting."

Presley said bundling of internet services with phone services should be made illegal to create a level playing field, and a regulator "with teeth" will be needed to accomplish that.

Unless this happened, she said, New Zealand would fall even further in the OECD rankings and - as her Powerpoint slides depicted - New Zealanders would look more like the Flintstones than the Jetsons.

The summit, sponsored by the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand, continues today.