KEY POINTS:
I have just managed to shave $1 a month off my monthly telecommunications bill. It's a miracle, I know.
Especially considering last month I got a letter from Vodafone telling me my Home Phone bill was about to go from $41 to $42.50 a month - an increase of 3.7 per cent from July 1.
"The good news is that it's only $1.50 more each month and with our home phone and talk plans you're still on one of the best deals in the market, with other providers charging up to $44 a month for the line rental," said the letter signed by one David Joyce, GM Marketing.
But I didn't think it was good news at all. So I rang the 0800 number and entered customer service hell - terrible musak and pre-recorded voice intermittently repeating it was sorry to keep me waiting.
Fifteen minutes later I got through to Melissa. "Why the increase?", I asked. "Can I put you on hold while I ask my supervisor about that?" said Melissa. "Yes," I sighed, resigned to the fact that, even though I was now talking to a real person, it was going to take a long time to get an answer.
Melissa popped back to tell me the increase was because of inflation. So did that mean everyone's Vodafone bill was going up - including those on broadband and phone packages? Melissa trotted off to ask her supervisor again and came back to say no, just Home Phone people.
I pointed out I was also a broadband customer and to cut a long story short (15 minutes of to-and-fro between me, Melissa and the supervisor), Melissa rang back to say she could put me on the Ultimate Pack plan for $90 a month. That gave me a $1 a month saving - $40 for the phone and $50 for the broadband. It remains a mystery why my former ihug phone and broadband package wasn't assimilated into the Vodafone scheme when the mobile giant bought ihug in 2006.
I then asked why I paid $12 a month for voicemail, call waiting and caller ID when other Home Phone users paid $5 per month for voicemail, $2 for call waiting and had caller ID for free? That was because they were Home Phone Plus users.
What was Plus? Melissa didn't really know and neither did her supervisor, but she could transfer me to another department who could tell me. By now I'd had enough, so we called it a day. I found out that Plus is when you pay a fixed monthly amount on top of your monthly rental for various types of toll calls.
My customer service dialogue illustrates the fundamental problem with big telcos. They make their money by slicing and dicing what is essentially the same service - connectivity - and packaging numerous variations. Sometimes there are so many bundles it's hard to know whether you want fries with that or to be super sized. Former Telecom chief executive Theresa Gattung put it most succinctly in her famous gaffe to analysts in 2006 when she said telcos routinely used confusion as a marketing tool and that customers knew "that's what the game has been".
If this is how competition is panning out, it's not very good. Ninety dollars a month for 20GB of broadband plus a phone is still too much and, in my case, not a lot better than before. Granted, if you're lucky enough to live near one of Auckland's recently unbundled exchanges, your broadband will be faster, so for your $90 a month you will be getting more speed.
But as a consumer I'm underwhelmed. Maybe things will get more interesting later this year when Vodafone is expected to introduce a broadband-only service minus the home phone, and bundles it with a mobile phone deal. By my calculations you should be able to save $40 a month. But don't hold your breath.
As we have seen in the duopoly mobile market, the New Zealand telco consumer always ends up paying too much.
