So Telecom New Zealand was forced to unbundle the local loop – without getting into that argument it was arguably a good thing to encourage investment by other telco players.

Those same telco players are now bemoaning the fact that Telecom is set to invest NZD1.4bill on a fibre network roll out in the next few years. The competitors claim that a fibre network will render irrelevant their investment in an unbundled copper network.

What do they want here? They make investment decisions in a competitive environment, what their competitors do to gain or retain a competitive advantage is beyond discussion – I don’t bemoan publicly the things my competitors do to get an edge (I might question their morals but I don’t ask for regulation to level the playing field).

The telcos should just get on with building high level products and services that shut out competition, not by virtue of their regulated environment, but by virtue of the compelling business case they present.

Disclosure – Diversity Limited is a consultant to Telecom New Zealand and its subsidiaries

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

1 Comment
  • I always believed and wrote on Geekzone that unbundling the local loop is no incentive to investments.

    Companies simply wanted to have access to copper so they could use the existing network to distribute services with little or no investment at all in infrastructure – I don’t count placing some DSLAMS around the country as “infrastructure”.

    ULL does not make for a competitive environment because those companies will always want to ride on someone else’s investment. And if Telecom New Zealand creates a new network those other telcos and ISPs will cry for access to that, and complain when Telecom charges for it.

    I think ULL is just some marketing campaign thing – “We hate the big players” say the telcos who do not want to invest.

Leave a Reply to M FreitasCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.