Chris Barton: Telecom pulls us back from the future

I celebrated my one-year anniversary of cutting my Telecom line last week.

It should have been a big party. Not only is there life after Telecom, but it's about $50 a month cheaper - mainly in cheaper phone calls through ihug, but also in low-cost broadband internet, which includes a healthy 10GB a month download cap. So why wasn't there dancing in the streets - or at least at my place?

Because you can't get what I have anymore. Ihug stopped selling it about five months ago and Wired Country, a subsidiary of power lines company Counties Power, which provides the wireless infrastructure to deliver this magic, is for sale.

That leaves me in limbo - like a species that has evolved into an advanced new world only to find it's running out of air.

Tough luck, you might say. Yes, but it raises one of the great imponderable questions of our time: Why do those who try to compete with Telecom find it so hard to live?

Is it because the Telecom monopoly simply deprives them of oxygen? Or is it something else - a lack of gumption; a loss of nerve, perhaps? In Wired Country's and ihug's cases, you'd have to say the latter.

Here is a technology - wireless transmissions from the Sky Tower and other high places to rooftop antenna - that completely bypasses Telecom's network.

Here is a network covering much of Greater Auckland that already uses internet protocol (IP), the very same technology to which Telecom is upgrading at a cost of $1.4 billion.

Here is the future now - and it works. So why isn't Wired Country making a killing instead of being killed?

Actually it's not dead yet, and there is a glimmer of hope - Callplus. It's a possible Wired Country buyer and the only company in the country with the nous, guts and that bit of mongrel needed to compete with Telecom.

It was a Callplus company, i4free, that some years back took Telecom to court for anticompetitive behaviour and won - in the end getting a substantial undisclosed settlement (it was seeking $18 million).

Callplus already offers some of the cheapest toll rates in New Zealand, and through its Slingshot service, some of the cheapest dial-up internet as well. And its latest venture, iTalk, makes it well versed in IP and prepared for the coming revolution in almost-free phone calls via the net.

Callplus has all the machinery to compete, and clearly, in some areas, it knows how to be smarter, better and faster than Telecom.

But the question this endangered wireless telecommunications user wants to ask is, could Callplus, or any other company that bought Wired Country, compete on all fronts? Could cut-throat competition outwit a monopoly?

From my Wired Country consumer's point of view and with the benefit of a year's hindsight, it seems so simple.

Compete on price. And keep competing. Cheapest always has prime appeal. When Wired Country launched, its prices were the best in town. Later, when Telecom cut its broadband prices to match, Wired Country didn't up the ante.

Compete on speed. Wired Country had the opportunity to raise the bar on what entry-level broadband means in NZ. It should have made 1 megabit a second the starting point, not 256 kilobits a second.

Compete on added value. Ihug - the only company to sell phone services on Wired Country's network - was terribly timid. It's phone rental was just $5 a month cheaper than Telecom's. It should have been half the price - and thrown in call waiting, caller ID and voicemail for free (instead of charging an additional $8 a month).

Compete on service. The one thing phone users can't abide is being without their phone. So when there's a fault, it's important to fix it fast and to automatically divert incoming calls to your mobile. Unfortunately, when it came to faults ihug could do neither - plus it made you wait at least 20 minutes to get through. And although Wired Country did eventually sort out my problem by installing a new aerial, the delay and uncertainty were unbearable.

No doubt all this is easier said than done. But surely it's not impossible.

Surely other telco life forms can thrive in this market.

If Wired Country can't compete with Telecom, then it's not just my telecommunications that are facing extinction, but competition itself.