Virtual competition
In the UK Tesco is a major supermarket chain but also
a serious player in the telco space. It’s gone from simply selling mobile
phones in blister packs to the full suite of Tesco-branded services, from
mobile to fibre. You can download movies, listen to unmetered streaming music,
buy toll calling packages and so on.
Tesco isn’t alone in this. Virgin Mobile is one of the
world’s leading mobile brands and has shaken up every market that it’s entered.
It operates in eight countries around the world, including Australia, the US
and UK, and it regularly scores highly in customer satisfaction surveys.
Neither company owns a network or ever intends to.
They are virtual operators and I’m curious as to why we have nothing on the
same scale in New Zealand.
Mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs in the
parlance) are operating here, but are so far below the radar as to be
non-existent.
Black+White launched with much fanfare but has almost
vanished since then. CallPlus and Orcon –both big-name brands in the ISP space
– have mobile offerings but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone using them.
The plans seem uninspired somehow and certainly can’t compete with the big
names, Vodafone and Telecom, despite using their networks.
In Australia MVNOs account for 13% of the market, yet
in New Zealand the total for all MVNO offerings is probably in single figures.
I think I can see why – MVNOs in New Zealand are on
account only, and New Zealand is predominantly a prepay market. Immediately,
most of New Zealand’s customers are unable to consider switching to an MVNO
provider because there is no prepay option.
Neither Telecom or Vodafone offer prepay MVNO services
and I wonder why that is. Vodafone in particular has a large percentage of its
customer base on prepay – could it be that Big Red doesn’t want to risk
cannibalising its own customer base?
Until MVNOs have access to prepay services and can
build their own plans and tariffs, we’re not going to see the kind of dynamic
marketplace that the UK or Australia has and that’s a loss for customers.
We’ll be asking the government to explicitly include
MVNOs in its review of the Telecommunications Act with a view to better
understanding the barriers to competition and why it is that a model which
works so well overseas simply doesn’t in New Zealand.
MVNOs around the world generally fall somewhere on a spectrum between "thin" MVNOS and "thick". Thin in this case means in essence a re-badging of existing products. Thick means the MVNO gets bulk data, minutes and TXTs and builds its own plans.
Locally our MVNOs tend to be at the thin end of things. They don’t build their own plans but resell existing plans. They can’t compete with their parent networks because as you say, they have no point of difference.
In order to compete, the MVNOs must switch to a thick model and must have access to prepay plans. One requires the MVNOs to do more, the other requires the network operators to offer realistic contracts in the prepay space. Whether regulation is needed is another matter. I’d hope not but it must be included in the regulatory review. MVNOs deliver real competition and value in most markets… why not here?
I think one reason that MVNOs haven’t taken off here is because apart from the name they can’t offer anything better that the carrier they are running on. take Orcon. Via Vodafone but would you really want to use their plans?? Last time I looked I could do better on one of the three main carriers. Even Vodafone AU has given up on the MVNO Crazy Johns and is shutting it down
Only Skinny has better plans (prepay) than the network it runs on (Telecom) but as you have said they are owned by Telecom so they can offer better plans.
The last thing we need in NZ is more Gov regulations so that MVNOs get better deals via their carriers. It would be a bit like the Gov telling LTE carriers to hike up their rates so that they won’t compete against fiber to the home..