Telecom roams Australia with Telstra

The New Zealand telco says the agreement is part of the preparation for the launch of its CDMA network in the middle if the year.

TEL executive Lorraine Witten says more than 70% of the demand for the company's roaming services is for travel to Australia.

"Telstra's network provides coverage to over 97% of the Australian population, so with this deal Telecom's customers will have the best trans-Tasman CDMA coverage.

"The deal paves the way to provide automatic seamless trans-Tasman roaming for Telecom CDMA customers at launch".

Telecom has signed a number of similar agreements worldwide and is negotiating several more. It claims there are now more than 90 million CDMA subscribers throughout the world.

The company recently axed the rollout of its Australian CDMA network by subsidiary AAPT, on which $150 million had already been spent in development.

Telecom is hoping the launch of the new network in New Zealand will boost lacklustre mobile growth and give it a more leading edge technology to compete against Vodafone, which is number two in the local mobile market.

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