KEY POINTS:
It's show and tell day for Telecom. The company's top brass are in Sydney briefing analysts on their strategies for continued growth and profitability.
In the newly regulated telco environment, and with the traditional voice call revenue stream drying up, Telecom needs to find innovative ways to make money.
One revenue stream Telecom has been talking about lately - and one which chief executive Paul Reynolds and co may shed more light on today - is a push into the provision of online and IT services for small business customers.
Telecom met local software-as-a-service companies last month to discuss partnership opportunities around targeting the small and medium enterprises (SME) market.
This is a sensible play by Telecom. In New Zealand's SMB-dominated business landscape, technology and online services lurch between offering significant productivity gains and being expensive frustrations.
A company such as Telecom is sure to find a market for a smorgasbord of useful web-based services if it can deliver them without fuss over a reliable internet connection.
Other technology companies have also seen the chance to jump on this revenue bandwagon and have been quietly nudging Telecom - and its IT/telco service provider competitors - along this web services path.
New Zealand's groaning broadband infrastructure is regularly derided. Bandwidth-intensive services such as video-on-demand and internet television (IPTV) remain a frustration for local users - images stutter as a result of slow download speeds and quickly chew through precious and expensive monthly data allocations.
At this week's Opportunities in Next Generation Networks conference in Auckland, internet technology company Juniper Networks demonstrated an "advanced multiplay network" system it says is a platform for broadband service providers to generate more revenue by selling customers more services.
The system offers a solution to some of the frustrations associated with data caps and slow downloads. It is able to prioritise different types of traffic so, for example, if there was a squeeze on available bandwidth, keeping a business's voice-over-internet phone system functioning would be given priority over non-critical activities in the office such as surfing the internet.
It can also differentiate between local and international internet traffic, meaning broadband service providers could sell local services that did not clock up data charges for customers.
(Moving internet traffic into or out of the country is more expensive for service providers than shifting it around locally.)
Juniper's lead systems engineer in New Zealand, Ian Quinn, says the multiplay network could "open up opportunities for people to use broadband more effectively" as well as making content more accessible, in the process giving service providers the opportunity to generate more revenue.
"That revenue helps drive investment in broadband as well."
Juniper has pitched the concept to all its local customers - who include Telecom, TelstraClear and Vodafone - though Quinn says the company does not yet have any deals to announce.
Juniper's Beijing-based vice-president of technical operations for Asia-Pacific, Matt Kolon says the multiplay network concept "is the path to the future, the path to salvation for the folks who own those lines [the broadband network providers]".
Siobhan McKenna, head of new media at broadcaster MediaWorks, vented on the topic at the next generation networks conference.
"We currently have a broadband infrastructure that breaks under comparatively small volume. In truth the fewer people who use it the better it is," she said.
"How is this helpful to the growth of our creative and knowledge economies in a global market?"
McKenna used a greengrocer analogy to slam those responsible for the "intermittent and unreliable" service she said could not even be described as real broadband.
"To date the New Zealand broadband experience has been akin to buying a kilo of tomatoes and receiving a quarter of a kilo and being told repeatedly by the vendor that he's giving you the full kilo and you, the purchaser, being badgered into accepting that the quarter of a kilo you're holding is indeed a kilo after all, and allowing yourself to pay for it as a kilo."
Kolon, who also spoke at this week's conference, says Juniper's multiplay network concept is not a work-around substitute for the type of high-speed, high capacity fibre-optic next generation network.
He is confident we will get a decent network sooner or later, but says no one ever has enough bandwidth, regardless of whether the underlying network infrastructure is our ageing copper wire-based DSL technology or fibre-optic technology.
"There is plenty of hope for people who don't have glass running in their front door in terms of their ability to take advantage of the type of services an NGN offers," Kolon says.
