Paul Brislen: Telecom shakeup? Don't bet on it ...

COMMENT

Maurice Williamson has finally told me what happened the night of his birthday party at Rod Deane's house. He told me all about the expensive gifts, the kickbacks, the overseas travel, the paper bags full of cash. He told me it's an urban myth.

"I went to the closing ceremony at the Commonwealth Games with [Telecom] once before I became Minister of Communications. That's about it, really."

Williamson is widely criticised for having done nothing to stop Telecom's dominance of the market.

Today he defends his record and says that, rather than having a cosy relationship with Deane, then the telco's CEO, he had some fierce arguments with him over Telecom's antics.

"I had the officials draw up some ghastly regulations that I'd show to them saying I thought these were pretty good and I wanted to introduce them."

Williamson is back in favour with the National Party after his falling out with Bill English when the latter was party leader. These days Williamson is again on the trail of telecommunications and information technology. Unfortunately, National's telco policy is almost indistinguishable from Labour's, so the current regime isn't likely to change in the foreseeable future.

Despite not pushing for major changes, Williamson says the current regime hasn't made a blind bit of difference to the end user, and I'd have to agree with him. Despite four years of regulation, prices for the average customer haven't moved much, if at all.

Sure, Telecom has introduced a new fast internet service, JetStream Surf, and Woosh and Wired Country have launched wireless internet services.

Broadcast Communications has become a wholesale server of bandwidth to the regions and we've had Project Probe extend the reach of the network to the remote parts of the country.

But all of those things are separate from a regulatory regime which has delivered very little in the only place it counts - the bottom line.

Williamson said he would increase the powers of the Telecommunications Commissioner to intervene and would demand a solution to number portability. It's this area, rather than unbundling, which he feels is holding back competition.

He would see the commissioner given a very short timetable to sort out such problems and that's got to be a good thing. The court case over Telecom's 0867 numbering scheme, for example, is at least a year away from a substantive hearing - a scheme that was introduced in 1999 and which has long since become all but irrelevant. With cases taking this long to reach the courts, it's vitally important the commissioner be given the powers to deal with such issues while they're still relevant, rather than confronting them years later.

Williamson said the privatisation of Telecom was "disastrously handled" by Labour and that we are still living with the results. But why didn't he push for regulatory change - including unbundling - during his own time as communications minister? Why did number portability fall off the radar back in 1999 when he'd reached the end of his tether with the incumbent?

One answer seems to be that his officials were almost paralysed with fear of being sued by Telecom. Both Williamson and the Commerce Commission were taken all the way to the Privy Council by Telecom and that's never a good look for a government.

As to unbundling, it's not going to happen on Williamson's watch.

"It's a breach of property laws. You can't sell an asset like Telecom and then expect to be allowed to take back chunks of it without at least paying its new owners a large sum of money. No finance minister will ever do that."

He's right, of course, but that's not what unbundling is all about. It's not a re-nationalising of Telecom's network, it doesn't stop Telecom making money off its network. It's a limitation to the control Telecom exerts over that network. No other country in the world has allowed the issue of property rights to get between it and unbundling and if Telecom can't deliver on its promise of 250,000 broadband customers by the end of next year, neither should we.

Both telco commissioner Douglas Webb and the current Minister of Communications, Paul Swain, have stated their willingness to revisit unbundling should Telecom not deliver, but we've seen this tactic repeated over and over again in the industry since liberalisation in the early 1990s.

Delay after delay has left us with no number portability and poor broadband uptake.

We have only now sorted out interconnection and are finally putting in place the bones of a regime that might just, one day, deliver on its promise: better service, lower price.

Williamson's own phone exchange in Pakuranga is incapable of offering those smart-phone services the rest of us are starting to take for granted and he's stunned that in this day and age Telecom isn't able to deliver the full suite of services to its customers.

Perhaps pressure arising from this type of situation is what we need to force our politicians to take this industry bull by the horns.


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