Forum Archive Index - May 2000

["Nigel Bree" <nbree@kcbbs.gen.nz>]

Mike Nelson wrote:
> Nonsense. [...] You obviously haven't or if you did someone else was
> paying if you think NZ is expensive.

The countries you refer to also had large state-run monopolies - BT,
Telstra, NTT, and so forth - not subject to any competition, and who
could thus use international tolls to subsidise other areas.

Here those calls are cheap here *solely* because of toll competition i.e.,
Clear (cf. prices before Clear arrived). For data, it's another matter
entirely, as you might have gathered from my reference to ISDN pricing.

> As for internet use in New Zealand. Seeing as NZ is rated among the top
> users in the world where have telecom gone wrong ?

We have a high level of internet use *per capita*, in *end users*; free
local calling is _the_ major enabling factor for that. Where NZ lags
terribly is in the commercial side of things, because the provisioning of
higher-bandwidth links for people who would like to host services is on
the very expensive side, because that has been exposed almost no
competition, and basically won't be for the forseeable future.

Of course, the banks not joining the party with credit card processing
and the until late in the game have also helped us lag in e-commerce, but
then outrageous prices for data services have been the norm here right
through the 80's until now - so we never really developed the same kind
of applications and infrastructure during the 70's and 80's which could
easily migrate to the Internet, as the Americans and Europeans did.

> Pricing would be hard to beat anywhere.

Not for data services, alas.



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