KEY POINTS:
It's nice to see Telecom maintaining the old egalitarian myth by treating wealthy art patron Jenny Gibbs with the same disdain as any other broadband customer. Or, in her case, wannabe customer.
For two years, this rich and powerful woman was given the bum's rush. Telecom couldn't, or wouldn't, provide broadband internet to her home in one of Auckland's most exclusive streets.
Not until Mrs Gibbs, angered by weeks of Telecom come-on promotions for broadband, came to the Herald, with the damaging publicity for the company that ensued, did the monopoly lines provider leap into damage control and suddenly do the impossible.
Sadly for the rest of suffering humanity, Mrs Gibbs was not set on becoming the people's champion. As soon as she gained the ability to download art prints from foreign parts at high speed, it was up with the drawbridge and, "Sorry, I'm all right, Jack, I don't want to talk to the media any more."
Which was a shame. Telecom would have found it harder to flannel the rest of us with one excuse after another if one of the privileged class was there to keep them honest. It seemed so little to ask of someone whose wealth, in part at least, derives from former husband Alan Gibbs' part in the privatising of Telecom. Still, the Gibbs affair has highlighted the nonsense Telecom would have us believe - that broadband coverage problems are isolated to a few people, far away in deepest Waiheke, a zillion kilometres from the nearest exchange.
Just before Christmas, a friend who lives on the desirable northern slopes of Herne Bay got an amazing letter from Telecom. A longtime broadband customer, he was told that "Xtra's broadband plans now offer speeds as fast as your phone line allows. For the majority of our customers, the change has been a good thing and they're getting better speeds. But unfortunately there are also some customers, yourself included, whose connection speeds have slowed down. Clearly this is a frustrating situation."
Telecom's solution? A free month's broadband (even though the letter said he couldn't take advantage of it) and the suggestion he either revert to snail-paced dial-up, or cancel the account.
The explanation offered was mumbo-jumbo: "Unfortunately, we can't avoid this reduction in speed, it's a result of the way broadband technology works. Introducing download speeds as fast as your line allows has caused more interference on phone lines and this, in turn, can result in slower connection speeds for some customers, particularly for people who live a long way from their phone exchange. This is the most likely cause of your speed reduction ... "
Telecom chief executive Theresa Gattung obviously was not kidding last year when she blurted out that "confusion" was a telco's "chief marketing tool".
In Saturday's Herald, a Parnell correspondent reported receiving the same stock letter. Paritai Drive, Herne Bay and Parnell are not the wop-wops. If Telecom can't get reliable broadband into these areas, it should hand over to a company that can.
Even for those of us who were getting decent speeds, something odd happened around October 26 when Telecom closed my existing Jetstream Plus, which offered 2Mbps maximum download speeds, and forced me on to the "Go Large" with download speed of "MAX" or "as fast as your line allows".
Since then, everything has slowed down and my phone line has developed a wet weather crackle. To me, it doesn't make sense that my line suddenly doesn't allow as fast a speed under MAX as it did under the earlier scheme.
One can only assume that, like the privatised rail system, Telecom has been squeezed for profits by its new shareholders, at the expense of basic infrastructural maintenance and improvement.
Meanwhile, while the infrastructure groans and splutters, the Telecom sales staff are pitching away like used car salesmen, promising Rolls-Royce performance from a secondhand Lada network.
Telecom has been ordered by the Commerce Commission to open up its copper wire monopoly network to its rivals. But what's the use of competition if the basic infrastructure is obviously not up to the job?
The Commerce Commission says it wants more complaints before it acts. How many more? The Herald letters pages and website emails are surely plenty to be going on with.
