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Chorus’s costs

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Chorus has a few tough decisions to make if yesterday’s financial reporting is anything to go by.

Where to prioritise its spending, where to make cuts and how to manage the regulatory process are all key questions the Chorus senior management will be asking themselves.

First things first, as you know TUANZ disagrees with Chorus on its handling of the regulatory process. The company should have seen the Commerce Commission UBA price point coming and had three years to prepare for it.

Fortunately, after a year of fluster from the government, we’re now back on track with a Final Pricing Principle (FPP) process to determine the costs of both UBA and UCLL components of the wholesale regime.

If I were Chorus I’d ditch the legal action against the Commission’s determination. It’s hard to see how that is anything but a delaying tactic at this point and could very well derail the whole process. Let’s just get on.

The good news is, regulatory issues aside, Chorus seems willing to do just that, focusing on the real heart of the matter – its cost structure.

Chorus has managed to bring the cost of each UFB premise passed to $3000. That’s a staggeringly high figure – in its bid process Chorus was estimating it would cost roughly half of that, and I have it from the LFCs that they pay significantly less per connection on average. This is the real problem and it’s good to see Chorus addressing it head on. Staff levels will have to fall, says CEO Mark Ratcliffe, and the company will have to consider how much and how it invests in copper lines.

This will be difficult for some customers – particularly those who are on the waiting lists for broadband. They may be years away from getting UFB and are hoping for more investment in the copper network to get them on to ADSL or VDSL in the meantime.

Unfortunately, not everyone is going to get copper broadband. Chorus’s main focus is on delivering the UFB and moving customers to that as quickly as possible. I suspect from here on in, it won’t be increasing the foot print of its copper network and will switch to maintenance only for most of us.

I’m in two minds about this. On one hand, customers need broadband today and as it’s now the 21st century we really shouldn’t be talking about people not being connected.

But on the other hand, copper is yesterday’s news and I want everyone (or as near as we can get) on fibre as quickly as possible.

Where Chorus must continue to invest in the copper realm is, of course, that quarter of the population that will never see a fibre connection under current plans. We need to make sure they don’t get left behind and I’m looking to the political parties to tell us what they plan to do about the digital divide.

The second point is Chorus’s ability to make money. As a regulated monopoly, it’s somewhat constrained in this. Chorus says it will be looking at new revenue opportunities and will be working with its customers (the ISPs) to determine what products it can come up with that they’ll actually be interested in buying.

When I first heard that, alarm bells rang. New ways to make money, eh? So you’ll be throttling everyone back to crawling speed and forcing the ISPs to buy bigger and better plans?

Chorus says no. In fact, to quote spokesman Ian Bonnar the company “categorically rules out” going for this so-called nuclear option.

I’m very pleased to hear that because the rumours among ISPs is that this is what was being planned. Certainly until yesterday I hadn’t heard Chorus deny it, rather it wouldn’t rule anything out. Now it has and that’s for the betterment of the industry as a whole.

So where can Chorus reduce its spend? I visited Northpower’s deployment last year and saw an overhead rollout moving swiftly and efficiently. Two-person teams connecting houses to fibre via overhead lines wherever possible. The record stood at just over an hour to connect one property.

We need more of that kind of approach deployed throughout the rest of the UFB network, I think, and it’s well worth looking to the other players to see what they’re doing well and what can be applied elsewhere.

But the single biggest thing that can be done to help Chorus, and indeed all the fibre companies, is to revisit this asinine resource consent process we currently have in place.

Even though this is a government project for the betterment of all New Zealand, even though this is a once-in-a-generation network replacement that will see us right for the rest of the century, the fibre companies have to jump backwards through hoops to get consent from all involved.

It’s foolish, to put it mildly.

Why aren’t we treating this as a replacement for what’s already in place and allow the fibre companies to install without needing all the red tape? Northpower tells me it could double the footprint of its fibre network in Northland if it didn’t have to spend so much on consents, and Chorus and the other LFCs would likewise make a tremendous saving.

That’s a network I’d like to see – perhaps we can whittle down that 25% non-fibre number and solve the digital divide as we go.

One thing is obvious – the day will come when each area is completed and Chorus can switch off the copper network. That needs to be managed and planning should start now. Whangarei will be fully fibred this year – there’s no need for Chorus to continue maintaining a network that is surplus to requirements, yet no thought has been given to Chorus’s requirement to provide the network of last choice. Once fibre is available to all properties in an area, the copper can go. That’s something we need to plan for right now.

Television over telco

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I remember attending the launch of JetVideo at the temporary America’s Cup village in Auckland in 2002.

Back then, it was an attempt to get customers to watch movies on their laptops to boost uptake of ADSL services. It failed, in no small part because ADSL1 wasn’t really up to the job, but also because back then it was all too hard to explain. Why would you want to watch a movie on your computer? It just didn’t make sense to a lot of people and the project was quietly shelved.

But of course it did make sense, it was just a bit early for some to really fully grasp.

The internet is the perfect delivery mechanism for high definition video content because it means the costly business of delivering the content is nullified. No need to ship tapes around the planet, no need to delay the launch of a movie and lose all that lovely marketing build-up, no need to deal with intermediaries at all – just go straight to the consumer and let them wear the cost of carriage.

That’s what makes Telecom’s other announcement on Friday so interesting. Changing the name is fine because Telecom was always supposed to be a temporary moniker anyway. I think it’s a good move because I still get calls about “Telecom” when the caller means “Yellow” or “Chorus” and because it draws a line under the bad old days of walking backwards slowly, to borrow a phrase, and means the company can now get on with the future.

And the future for the retail telco market is in making sure customers use your service, typically delivered over someone else’s network.

The move does bring a few matters to the fore, not least net neutrality; the issue of access to content and of course money.

First things first, net neutrality.

In the US this battle is just starting to really get serious, with Netflix signing a deal with Comcast to make sure Netflix customers get access to the service.

Some accuse Comcast of stand-over bully-boy tactics, especially when it became apparent that Netflix customers were being throttled one way or another in the past few weeks.

Others say the deal that’s been struck is simply a peering arrangement between a large content provider and its carrier so there’s no problem, nothing to see.

But it’s more than that. Comcast was supposed to be able to make money from its customers – end users, like you and me – and yet here it is demanding payments from the other end of the spectrum as well. Content producers, it seems, will be asked to fork out for delivery of their product to consumers. The telcos will get two bites of the cherry.

So what does that mean in the Telecom ShowMeTV context?

The first question is, will Telecom use television to create a walled garden and to differentiate its ISP offerings from the other players in the market?

The answer appears to be a resounding no. Telecom says it will make its TV content available to other ISPs. That is, it won’t be buying content exclusively for Telecom customers.

That’s quite interesting and not something the old Telecom would have considered.

There’s an aggregator role in the content world that is up for grabs. Sky TV wants it, TVNZ could do it, but it could also fall to a newcomer like Netflix or Quickflix, although both have issues. Telecom and Vodafone are two obvious candidates to add to the list and it would appear both are interested to some degree or other.

I’ll be very  pleased if Telecom resists the urge to use ShowMeTV as a way to shore up its ISP customer base because this is an entirely different market for the company, and takes it in a new direction.

Vodafone already offers TV over its telco networks, of course, but it’s chosen to cement its relationship with Sky TV and so simply resells Sky’s line-up.

Telecom is talking about a whole new approach, buying “subscriber video on demand” (SVOD) rights and offering a New Zealand equivalent of Netflix.

Currently only Quickflix is doing that legally in New Zealand and is struggling with a back catalogue and limited access to new content. That’s changing, and the company is starting to make headway in the market, but it’s taking a long time.

One of the reasons for that lag is access to content, and this is something Telecom will face as well. Although Sky TV tells me it doesn’t have any SVOD exclusivity, it does appear to have contracts with ISPs that prohibit them from making money out of non-Sky content. That is, if you want to offer Sky content you have to take the entire Sky TV package and you can’t add on anything of your own.

The Commerce Commission concluded there was a case to answer, but declined to press charges because of the costs involved. Clearly this is a piece of legislation that will need looking at if that’s the case because it’s not working terribly well.

Which brings up larger question about regulation – internationally telecommunications and broadcasting are starting to be merged together under one regulator. New Zealand is quite unusual in that it doesn’t have any form of broadcasting regulation to speak of. Should we go down that track?

I’d rather see the Commerce Act tidied up to begin with, but Telecom’s foray into television will result in a discussion about such things if nothing else.

Which brings us to the root of all evil, money. Telecom is putting up $20m for its content buy-up, which is a large chunk of change, but pales into insignificance next to Sky TV’s hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year. Will Telecom be able to compete?

In the UK, BT has also gone down this track with spectacular results. BT has bought the rights to Champions League football and made all 350 matches available to subscribers. In doing so, it has attracted 1m new customers, making it a tremendously powerful play.

But the rights cost BT nearly £1bn, so those new customers “cost” the company £1000 each. That’s a heck of a lot of cash to pay for a customer, and as Simon Moutter pointed out at a Commerce Commission conference late last year, BT can afford to do that because it’s a vertically integrated player. Telecom/Spark is not, and would take years to repay that sort of customer acquisition cost.

That’s probably why telcos like Comcast, which face a future where they can’t make money from toll calls, TXT messaging or indeed anything but data bundles, are looking to content producers as a new source of revenue. Sadly, the content producers face exactly the same crunch as the internet does to the content market what it’s also doing to the telco market – that is, cutting out the middle man.

What do you make of Telecom’s move? Will we see more of this kind of deal in the future, and where do you get your television from today?

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FPP Round One: Chorus makes an offer, but it comes with caveats

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Chorus’s submission to the Commerce Commission over how to proceed in its Final Pricing Principle (FPP) determination makes for interesting reading.

Chorus has commissioned one of the world’s leading economic agencies – Analysis Mason – to write a report that forms part of its submission. AM is a force not to be trifled with. It has worked for the UK’s Ofcom looking at BT’s own liabilities in this area among other things, and has worked in the New Zealand market for several years writing reports for all sides of the various debates.

Chorus proposes not bothering to model the costs at all.

Rather, it offers to allow the Commission to use its actual costs to build a picture of what a Modern Equivalent Asset (MEA) looks like, and would do so based on its existing copper infrastructure.

That’s an important point to note – the government’s Discussion Document presumed that any MEA would have to be based on the fibre to the home programme, since no telco would roll out copper today.

TUANZ has argued that in fact copper does form a major part of any modern telco network, as would a fixed-wireless offering, but let’s come back to that later.

Chorus’s proposal has some serious merits to it. First, and perhaps best of all, we would see what it actually costs to build and run the very network which we’re talking about. A copper-line based network, in New Zealand, operating today. Chorus would assist the Commission by opening its books just enough for the Commission staff to produce a result. I’m guessing the rest of the industry won’t be allowed such a detailed look – that detail would end up being redacted as being “commercial in confidence” which would make for an interesting debate.

And it’s a lot quicker than building a theoretical model – also something that should appeal to all parties, as having this thing drag on for years is problematic to put it mildly.

But there are downsides to this approach. Not least of these is that Chorus hasn’t always made the smartest decisions when it comes to its costs and that modelling these inefficiencies and ruling them out would have to go by the by. Chorus suggests the expense and time taken to model for these would be hopeless and so it’s an all or nothing approach – you can have the data, but you can’t remove the warts.

AM’s “Working Paper” on how this would all happen suggests making some small adjustments but basically there would be no comparison of an efficient network versus an inefficient one.

AM also suggests that only Chorus’s network would do for this study – no point looking at CallPlus’s experiences in this area because it’s too small a company, with too limited a range of customers and that would skew the model, it says.

That’s interesting because in the conference held last year on all of this, CallPlus pointed out that it sells a product identical to UBA in the market today and does so at less than the Commerce Commission’s draft price which Chorus soundly rejected.

AM would also very much like to ignore the lessons learned from the Canterbury earthquake, namely that putting all your cables underground is a very silly thing to do in a country that can shake itself to bits from time to time. AM suggests that Chorus’s currently model of ducting and tunnelling is the industry ideal, and that any MEA built today would involve extensive digging.

That’s simply not the case. Certainly, the blue rinse set of ladies who lunch do like to talk a good talk when it comes to urban beautification and the need to remove those unsightly poles, but most utility companies will tell you that putting stuff underground is expensive, time consuming and doesn’t add anything to the network’s efficiency. Northpower, for example, is building its fibre network entirely above ground where it can, going so far as to put the electronics on the poles as well as the cables.

While we welcome the suggestion that real-world costs be used, the model requirements are for an efficient network deployment and that avoidable costs should be just that – avoided.

It’s also interesting to note that the AM report rules out using fixed-wireless assets as part of this assessment. The report AM produced is quite damning:

“It is very likely that wireless solutions are also not capable of delivering the expected future average throughput required from fixed broadband connections at an economic level and with current constraints”

says the report. We would beg to disagree – the RBI deployment is not restricted to what the report terms “ultra rural” but is being used to service around 20% of the population. It is a far more efficient approach to delivering broadband to non-urban areas than laying fibre to each property, given the distances and population density involved.

TUANZ would like to see real world figures used. We would like to see prices modelled on an aerial deployment, not a costly underground deployment, and would like to see some comparison figures produced – potentially on the experiences of the LFCs or CallPlus as well as the RBI. By comparing and contrasting with these deployments, we should build up a picture of both what real-world costs actually look like and what costs can and should be avoided.

Chorus cannot expect the industry – and subsequently the users – to pay for its inefficiencies. This process is about determining what an efficient network operator would do, not one that has every reason to ratchet up the price.

 

EDIT: The Commerce Commission has now published the full raft of submissions.

Press release: No evidence of health effects from mobiles

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No evidence of biological or adverse health effects from mobile phone technology

 

MOBILE TELECOMMUNICATIONS & HEALTH RESEARCH (MTHR) PROGRAMME – FINAL REPORT PUBLISHED

 

 

The UK’s largest programme of research into possible health risks from mobile phone technology has today published its final report, and finds no evidence of biological or adverse health effects.  The report summarises studies completed since an earlier report in 2007.

 

The research programme found no evidence that exposure to base station emissions during pregnancy affects the risk of developing cancer in early childhood, and no evidence that use of mobile phones leads to an increased risk of leukaemia.

 

Professor David Coggon, Chairman of MTHR, said “When the MTHR programme was first set up, there were many scientific uncertainties about possible health risks from mobile phones and related technology.  This independent programme is now complete, and despite exhaustive research, we have found no evidence of risks to health from the radio waves produced by mobile phones or their base stations. Thanks to the research conducted within the programme, we can now be much more confident about the safety of modern telecommunications systems.  To be sure that there are no delayed adverse effects, which only become apparent after many years, the programme provided funding to set up an epidemiological investigation (the COSMOS study) which will follow-up a large population of mobile phone users long-term.  Future Government support for this study and any new research on mobile phones and health will be managed by the Department of Health.”

 

Recognising concerns among members of the public and workers in the emergency services, the MTHR programme included large and well-designed investigations into the possible effects of emissions from TETRA radios and base stations that are used by the emergency services. Reassuringly this research found no evidence for adverse effects associated with exposure. 

 

The programme also included research to investigate whether the modulation of radio signals that is used to encode speech and data for telecommunications could elicit specific effects in cells or tissues. No effects were found in any of the experiments, which used a wide range of tissue types and endpoints. When taken together with the results from provocation studies described in the previous MTHR report, this now constitutes a significant body of evidence that modulation of signals does not lead to health risks.

 

The £13.6 million MTHR programme has been jointly funded by the UK government and the telecommunications industry.  Throughout its existence, the programme has been overseen by an independent Programme Management Committee (PMC), to ensure that none of the funding bodies could influence the outcomes of the research.  The PMC selected and monitored all studies in the programme.

 

This report effectively brings the programme to a conclusion after 11 years of detailed research and, when taken together with the earlier 2007 Report, provides a complete summary of the projects supported. It also summarises work undertaken to improve the assessment of exposures, and includes detailed descriptions of the exposure systems used for the provocation studies in the programme. Most of the research results generated by the programme have been published in the peer-reviewed scientific and medical literature, resulting in around 60 papers.

 

 

 

MTHR P/10                                                                                                                        

10 February 2014                                                                                                       

NOTES FOR EDITORS

 

The Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme was set up in response to the research recommendations contained within the ‘Stewart Report’ published in May 2000.

 

The Programme received approximately £13.6 million of funding from a variety of government and industry sources.

 

To ensure the independence of the research carried out, scientific management of the programme was entrusted to an independent Programme Management Committee made up of independent experts, mostly senior university academics. Funds contributed by the sponsors of the Programme were managed on behalf of the Committee by the Department of Health as Secretariat to the Programme.

 

The first Chairman of the Programme Management Committee was Sir William Stewart. Professor Lawrie Challis became chairman on Sir William’s retirement in November 2002, and was succeeded as chairman by Professor David Coggon in January 2008.

 

The Programme was set up in 2001 and has supported 31 individual research projects, mostly undertaken in UK universities. Of these, one remains ongoing and will be managed as part of the Department of Health’s Policy Research Programme. All the remaining projects have been completed and most results have been published in peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals (almost 60 papers to date).

 

The results of the programme are summarised in the Report 2007 and the Report 2012. Both reports outline the state of knowledge at the time of the Stewart Report and the current state of knowledge, taking account of both research supported by the Programme and that carried out elsewhere. The latest report also includes advice to the Department of Health on future research priorities.

 

Both reports and details of all the projects supported by the Programme are published on its website (http://www.mthr.org.uk).

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Don’t cry for MEA – why modern equivalent assets are so important

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There’s a term we’re going to hear a lot this year as the arguments about wholesale price of access to Chorus’s network reach fever pitch – modern equivalent asset (MEA).

Before you can decide what ISPs and telcos should pay for a service, you have to work out what it costs to deliver that service.

The Commerce Commission has already done that, based on benchmarking against other similar countries. It considers a raft of appropriate measures and issues, thins down the list of potential countries to those with similar regulatory regimes (among other things) and produces an “Initial Pricing Principle” (IPP).

It’s a quick way of working out what the local price should be; quick being relative of course. This is the Commerce Commission so it takes about 12 months. It involves picking a range and then, in years gone by, choosing the 50th percentile mark on that range. That’s moved somewhat and recent decisions have moved to the 75th for a variety of reasons.

But it is just a compare/contrast exercise and when there’s enough unhappiness, the Commission can be asked to conduct a Final Pricing Principle (FPP) wherein it’s supposed to work out what the service actually costs to deliver.

However, the Commission is run by lawyers and economists, not engineers, so don’t get too excited about the phrase “actual cost” because it’s not. Instead of pricing up network build costs and determining what the actual “actual cost” is, the Commission must build an economic model that takes into account how much it costs to raise the money to build a network (sigh), efficient costs but not inefficient costs and so on. As part of that, the Commission must determine the MEA of a new network and use that for the basis of its pricing.

If that seems a little odd (“I have based the sale price of my 1978 Triumph TR7 on the current equivalent which is of course the Aston Martin DB9…”) that’s because it is. It’s very odd to consider building an economic model for the price of one product built over the past century by looking at the price of a similar asset that would be built today. Not every country considers MEA to be appropriate and there’s a good outline of the various issues and complexities associated with this kind of exercise on the Ofcom website, “Alternative methodologies for the valuation of BT’s duct assets” which is as thrilling a read as you’d expect from a title like that.

So what would a modern network look like? The government, in its long tarnished discussion document, suggests that the obvious MEA is a fibre to the home network such as the UFB. It even points to the European Commission where the regulator says as much in a press release:

“the appropriate ‘modern equivalent asset’ for calculating copper access costs seems to be a fibre network: after all, no operator would today build a copper network”

But there is a lot of disquiet about that position. BEREC (the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communication) suggests that using a UFB network as the MEA adds new problems, not least of which is a high price for copper services for those that are left on copper and will never see fibre deployed.

If we are to go down this MEA model route, and we are because those are the FPP rules, then we need to very carefully consider the question of the technology itself.

First you need to consider what the asset was built for, as well as what a modern asset would be designed to do, which brings us to Murray Milner’s mushroom model.

Milner, a long-time Telecom stalwart who has since moved on to board roles with Crown Fibre, among other luminaries, described the mushroom model to me many years ago. Telcos will build high density capacity in areas of high customer density, medium capacity in areas of medium demand and so on.

That means in CBDs you get fibre, the suburbs get copper and rural New Zealand gets wireless.

That still holds true today: compare, for example, our UFB and RBI projects.

Any MEA used to price copper must use a technology-neutral approach to working out what a modern asset looks like. It’s not as simple as declaring fibre to be the winner. The MEA for a 1978 Triumph isn’t an Aston Martin at all, it’s a small car or a bus pass or a scooter or any of the modern choices we have available.

A modern asset model must consider the modern world and modern uses, in all their various options. Anything else simply doesn’t stack up

Hotel wifi

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The summer is good for catching up with old friends and this year has been no different. Oddly, I’ve heard from two former journo colleagues both complaining about the same thing – hotel wifi charges.

Everyone, it seems, has a “you won’t believe this” story about hotels and the way they charge for wireless internet access.

Peter Nowak, formerly a New Zealand Herald tech journalist and now safely back home in the winterless north (Canada) has a nice blog post about the costs of wifi around the world (avoid Australia, he suggests) and points out that fast internet access competes with the hotel’s own revenue stream from phone calls, movies and of course every politician’s nightmare, the porn channel (hint to all MPs: if you knew more about the internet you wouldn’t have this kind of problem).

That’s fine, in so far as it goes, but the damage such exorbitant costs incur on the tourism industry are large and growing. Tourists these days don’t plan a six-week jaunt down to the minutest detail – instead, they travel point-to-point, planning as they go. Hit a rough patch with no realistic internet pricing and word will get around: avoid.

My second catch-up, with a man who wishes to remain anonymous, includes a list of Six Things You Should Never Do At a Hotel:

·         Buy wifi

·         Make phone calls using the room phone

·         Buy anything from the minibar

·         Watch pay-per-view TV (even the non R18 stuff)

·         Exchange currency.

And I fear he’s quite right. It’s all part of the round of “nickel and diming” that goes on at hotels, and it leaves visitors with a nasty taste in their mouths I suspect.

So how do we fare locally? I don’t stay in hotels often enough to claim to be a connoisseur of hotel internet connectivity, but if my experience at conference venues is anything to go by, New Zealand still has a long way to go.

My mystery contact was charged $5.10 (why not just $5?) for half an hour’s internet access at one location, and was so incensed by the pricing at another that he went to the local café where the “free wifi” was so well shielded by process and security (an eight-digit password but they handed out ten-digit numbers on slips of paper) that he gave up entirely.

“I got internet access in one hotel by sitting in the lobby, which is bad enough, but when you have to buy access in two hourly blocks, it’s contiguous time. You can’t spend 20 minutes in the morning then come back in the afternoon to use the rest, you have to buy another two hours’ worth. It’s a rort,” he rants.

It’s nowhere near as bad as Australia though, and I can add my own worst tale – a hotel that billed itself as a “business hub” and offered wifi in the rooms. Great – I’ll take that, I said. Great, they said – here’s your wifi cable.

Erm. Wifi doesn’t need cables, said I, to much confusion. Apparently nobody else had ever complained. I suspect the owner thought “wifi” was a new marketing term for broadband.

Peter points to a lovely website that lets you rate your hotel’s wifi speed. There are no New Zealand entries so next time you’re travelling, why not test it out and we’ll build up a picture of the New Zealand hotel scene and we can compare notes.

On the plus side, the mobile phone companies are now fighting for your dollar, so you can get decent rates for mobile broadband ranging from casual use right up to 2Degrees’ fabulous 12GB for $99 that lasts for up to six months. If the phone world has taught me anything, it’s that customers like simple pricing that doesn’t involve being stung with extra charges all the time. The phone companies are slowly learning that – it’s time the tourist industry followed suit.

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Spectrum

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Telecom has won the second 700MHz spectrum auction with a bid of $83 million for a block of 2x5MHz spectrum.

I’m sure nobody at Telecom HQ is celebrating, however, because it’s paid around four times as much as it had for the 2x15MHz block it bought last year.

Paying $66m for 2x15MHz was a reasonable amount. It wasn’t cheap, but it certainly wasn’t up there with the kinds of stupidity we saw in the UK and Europe during the 3G spectrum craze of the early 2000s.

All three mobile operators were happy enough with the $22m they paid per block.  I can’t imagine how Simon Moutter and co are feeling right now, but probably they look a bit green. $22m was OK, but $83m? That’s another matter entirely.

Telecom didn’t even want to bid on the remaining block. They argued that the last 5MHz pair should be left on the table for another round of bidding in a few years’ time when 2Degrees could, presumably, afford to buy it.

That made a lot of sense. TUANZ argued against having an auction at all – each of the three network operators should have been given 2x15MHz so as to preserve the competitive market in the 700MHz space, but if we had to have one, any excess spectrum left over shouldn’t be flogged off just to raise cash. Sadly, that’s just what the government has done. Telecom was forced to take part even though it wasn’t keen because it couldn’t allow Vodafone to simply walk away with the extra spectrum. Vodafone, likewise, couldn’t let Telecom have it cheaply either, and unfortunately we’ve seen the telco equivalent of the Cold War end in a huge cost.

Worse, when you look at the overall spectrum holdings you’ll find that 2Degrees has just on 100MHz of spectrum, Telecom has double that and Vodafone has nearly 300MHz of spectrum available to it right across the managed spectrum range.

That imbalance means Vodafone and Telecom already have a huge advantage over 2Degrees when it comes to the total spectrum market and that’s going to be a problem if we want a truly competitive landscape.

Should we care that Telecom has paid a fortune for the spectrum? Surely that’s its problem and good on the government for getting the best dollar for the tax payer? Well yes and no. Telecom will have to find that money somewhere and I’m guessing it wasn’t down the back of a couch. It probably will have to come either from the existing capex budget, which means something else will go by the board, or it’ll be raised from the customers.

That much money would have paid for (by my calculation) an additional 160 cellsites around the country, which would have been very nice to see in rural New Zealand. Instead, Telecom will have a nice piece of paper that says yes, it can build a cellphone network in the 700MHz range.

The good news is this isn’t a done deal. The Commerce Commission still has to assess whether or not the extra spectrum breaches the Commerce Act in terms of market dominance. We’d argue that yes, it does and I’d go further and say that both the telcos and the customers would be better off if we set aside this auction and leave the last 5MHz pair on the shelf for the time being.

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The year ahead

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Looking ahead, this year is going to be quite a busy one in terms of telecommunications, so I hope you all had a good rest of the new year break.

Normally I head off to the Coromandel to a secret location where I pitch a tent, make do without running water or electricity and where my phone (and everyone else’s) simply fails to find a signal.

This is fantastic because it means I am completely cut off from my normal life and rest is guaranteed. We kayak, we swim, we eat well, and while the kids can run around all night if they want, I go to bed and rise with the sun.

It’s a chance to switch off, to renew my batteries (as it were) and to do something completely removed from my normal existence and I love it.

But if I had to live like that every day, I’d go nuts. Running water and electricity are pretty key, but as the owners of the farm where I stay have pointed out, the need for decent telecommunications is critical.

They have a 15 year old son who can’t call his friends, can’t play games, can’t do any homework, can’t read newspapers or go online in any way shape or form for the entire time he’s at home. The exchange is too far away for DSL to work well and besides, the cabinet is full. There’s no cellphone signal from any provider and oddly not a single wireless ISP operates on the north eastern side of the Coromandel. Why? I have no idea.

This summer has been the last straw for him and he’s declared that as soon as he’s able he’ll be off to the city or at least to an internet café that can let him connect to the world.

It’s not just him – all of rural New Zealand faces this challenge and we urbanites face it with them. If we lose the rural communities we lose so much of what makes New Zealand unique. It’s not just a cultural thing, it’s the basis for our entire economy as well. Boost our farmers’ productivity by a couple of percent and we’ll all be better off.  Reduce their ability to compete (as we’re surely doing for those that don’t have access) and the inverse will also be true.

Rural broadband must be a key priority for the year ahead. However, the key component of delivering such connectivity – spectrum – is already being sorely tested.

Both Vodafone and Telecom are fighting over the remaining pair of 5MHz spectrum in the 700MHz range and, if the rumours are to be believed, are already bidding more for that pair than both bid for the 15MHz blocks they’ve already bought. Why? Because the government has decreed that the remaining block must be sold off and neither company can afford to allow the other to win, hence the price war.

This is ridiculous.

Both companies already have more than enough 700MHz spectrum and neither particularly wanted to bid for the last block.

Both companies have plenty of spectrum in the sub-1000MHz range that can be re-purposed for future network technologies and which could be readily deployed in rural New Zealand but because of the government’s greed and short-sightedness (there’s really no other way to look at it), they’re forced to spend money on a piece of paper instead of on rural cellsites.

The Commerce Commission has to grant permission for the winner to have so much spectrum so I have high hopes it’ll do the right thing and refuse to give the go-ahead.  All three telcos will be relieved if that’s the outcome – Telecom, 2Degrees and Vodafone – because the alternative is one player wins the 4G battle but at such a huge cost.

Which brings us to the question of government and the upcoming election. I’m told the likely date is November but it’s up to the Prime Minister to decide, which means it could be earlier if he sees an advantage to going sooner rather than later.

And there may well be an advantage in that. Currently Labour have yet to announce many of its policies and are lagging behind in the polls. The Greens have always had a strong ICT policy (its views on cellphones and cellsites notwithstanding) and the other minor parties are starting to display a keen interest, possibly as a result of the Chorus debacle.

And then there’s Kim Dot Com and the Internet Party.

Putting aside personality for a moment, I’ve long wondered why we don’t have a tech-focused party. MMP lends itself to such issue-led parties and I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of them. The Greens are a perfect example: why not ICT as well?

The question of course making the numbers will be determined by the policies of the Internet Party and we have yet to see those, but I am heartened by any party that raises the profile of ICT issues and if nothing else, the other politicians will have to improve their understanding of ICT to compete and that’s no bad thing.

The final issue on the table must be our lack of international connectivity. I have high hopes that 2014 will see an end to this idea that we are fine and that another cable isn’t needed. One of the various projects has to get off the ground this year and I hope it will see us connected to the US rather than Australia. If we’re to build an ICT industry in New Zealand to rival dairy farming we need to have that connection to the US – anything less will see us become an offshoot of Australia and we might as well give up our sovereignty at that point and become a second Tasmania.

What are the other issues you’d like to see on the agenda this year? You’ll note I haven’t included Chorus and there’s a reason for that. The problem and the resolution lie within Chorus itself and it’s up to the company now to figure out how to complete its contractual obligations. If it can’t, then no doubt we’ll talk more but for now the ball is firmly in Chorus’s court and I trust there it will remain until the company comes to its senses.

MEDIA RELEASE TUANZ to seek NZX, FMA and SSC Inquiries

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TUANZ TO SEEK NZX, FMA & SSC INQUIRIES

The Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand (TUANZ) will write tomorrow to the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX), the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) and the State Services Commission (SSC) asking them to investigate unusual movements in the share price of Chorus Ltd (NZX: CNU).

On Friday, when a report by EY Australia into the financial viability of Chorus was received by the government but not released publicly, shares in Chorus Ltd jumped by over 7%.  Today, after the report was rushed out on Saturday by Communications & IT Minister Amy Adams, the shares have remained broadly stable.

A similar trading pattern has been observed other times that Ms Adams has made major announcements, such as when she issued a Discussion Document on pricing for copper broadband and voice services in August.

“Looking at the graphs, it seems when Ms Adams makes a market-sensitive announcement, shares in Chorus move significantly beforehand but not after,” TUANZ chief executive Paul Brislen said today.

“While TUANZ is not making any accusations against anyone, many hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.  The strange price movements in Chorus shares over the last year merit investigation by the NZX and FMA in order to assure everyone that no insider trading has occurred.  

“Given the strange price changes all seem connected with government announcements, it also makes sense for the SSC to investigate the matter, as it did over the leaks about MFAT restructuring.

“Assurances are needed that people who may be privy to forthcoming government announcements are neither trading on that information themselves nor providing it to third parties.”

END


MEDIA RELEASE: EY report shows no need for copper tax

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COALITION FOR FAIR INTERNET PRICING

MEDIA RELEASE

14 DECEMBER 2013

EY REPORT SHOWS NO NEED FOR COPPER TAX OR GOVT BAILOUT

Today’s EY Australia report vindicates the Coalition for Fair Internet Pricing’s view that neither a copper tax nor a taxpayer bailout is necessary to resolve the ultra-fast broadband (UFB) issue.

“This report is good news,” a spokesman for the coalition, Paul Brislen, also chief executive of the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand (TUANZ), said today.

“It proves that the government’s flagship UFB initiative can be built on time and within budget with a straightforward capital raising – and without a copper tax, barmy ideas like slowing broadband speeds to dial up, or any other old-fashioned state interventions or taxpayer bailouts.

“The report indicates that a capital raising by Chorus Ltd of around $500 million would solve all alleged problems with building the UFB after new fair prices for copper broadband and voice services come into force on 1 December 2014.

“Ms Adams is to be commended for commissioning this report and releasing it with plenty of time before the NZX and ASX open on Monday.

“It is the first solid, independent information on Chorus’s financial situation to be made available since the Commerce Commission announced last December the new fair prices it had determined under Steven Joyce’s Telecommunications Amendment Act 2011.”

Mr Brislen said the coalition would accept for the time being Chorus’s claims that the new fair copper prices would reduce its monopoly revenue by $1.07 billion through to 2020, although it remained sceptical the impact was so high.

He noted that Prime Minister John Key had previously rubbished early estimates the impact could be as high as $600 million and economists Covec had calculated the value of the copper tax to be no more than $449 million between 1 January 2015 and 31 December 2019.

EY Australia makes clear in its report it simply accepted Chorus’s claims of a $1.07 billion funding gap.

“The coalition will be studying these numbers more carefully in the days ahead, but even if the shortfall is as much as Chorus now claims, EY Australia says that much of it can be addressed through changes to dividend policies and debt headroom,” he said.

“Our initial view is that were Chorus to raise around $500 million in new equity, it could fill its alleged funding gap without recourse to the more barmy ideas to enhance revenue, such as reducing broadband speeds to that of the old dial-up services.

“Especially in the context of the booming New Zealand economy next year, raising $500 million in new equity for what is a growth stock is undoubtedly doable.”

Mr Brislen said the report not only vindicated the coalition’s arguments that a copper tax was unnecessary but also Mr Joyce’s landmark Telecommunications Amendment Act 2011, the Commerce Commission’s implementation of that Act and Ms Adams’ decision to commission EY Australia to review Chorus.

“The government has no stronger supporter of its UFB initiative than the Coalition for Fair Internet Pricing,” Mr Brislen said.

“We look forward to working with the government to play whatever constructive role we can in fast-tracking both the building and take up of the new UFB.”