Unplugging TelstraClear

Workmen on a street in Tauranga take down one of the cell sites of the defunct TelstraClear "Unplugged" network.

Unplugged was a $50 million project that was designed to offer people in the Tauranga region phone and broadband services as an alternative to Telecom.

That plan and TelstraClear's mobile strategy fell apart last month when TelstraClear decided that some changes to its roaming agreement with Vodafone would make Unplugged's business case unworkable. An acrimonious war of words with an indignant Vodafone followed. It's unclear how much of the allocated spend TelstraClear blew on the project but it would most certainly have been tens of millions of dollars.

So what now for TelstraClear? A lot of people in the telecoms industry are asking the same question and failing to come up with compelling answers. One thing is for sure, that picture above says more about the state of competition in the telecoms market than any OECD report can.

The local tech blogosphere:

Russell Brown on why counting digital downloads in the music charts is a "no-brainer".

Richard McManus on Facebook's move to an open platform.

Around the web:

An interesting CNet podcast looking at why Dell has decided to finally sell its computers through the WalMart retail chain.

Readwriteweb has a piece on the Open Coffee Club, an online network for web entrepreneurs to get in touch with each other and arrange meetings. There doesn't appear to be a New Zealand chapter yet, but there is one in Sydney.