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Virtual competition

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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.

Cost based modelling

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The Commerce Commission has made the only decision it could
regarding the UBA wholesale price determination process – it will continue to
work towards a final determination due before the end of the year.

Sadly the government has already said the Commission’s work
is irrelevant because it will introduce a review and a new Telco Bill that will
supersede the determination before it comes into effect in 2014. The
Commission’s work, vital as it is, will be completely sidelined in the process.

Chorus has also indicated that it’s likely to ask for a
“final pricing principle” on the UBA price alongside the UCLL (that’s the
unbundled service) FPP it’s already asked for. An FPP is a major piece of work
whereby the Commission works out how much the service actually costs (I know, I
agree it’s a bit odd that it doesn’t do that as standard but when you’ve sat
through as many economists’ presentations on cost models as I have you realise
that the Commission’s true role is to keep economic lecturers employed) and is
likely to take quite some time. The Commission has indicated that it may miss
the December 2014 timeframe and slip into 2015 because of that.

Actually I don’t mind the Commission doing the FPP work. I
think it makes sense to know exactly what we’re dealing with. The problem is,
the government doesn’t want to know what it actually costs to deliver broadband
over copper lines, it wants to make sure Chorus can continue to build the UFB
and as Chorus has said it won’t be able to if the price of copper drops (for
reasons I’ll get to in a minute) the government won’t have a bar of an actual
price point.

This is a shame because the review of the telco act could do
with a dose of facts, to put it mildly.

Currently the government is being led by Chorus’s world view.
Any reduction in wholesale rates will reduce Chorus’s income stream and
therefore jeopardise its ability to pay for the UFB deployment. On top of the
losses to copper line revenue, Chorus also faces a huge blow-out in terms of UFB
deployment costs to the tune of $300m in the first year alone, and so
logically, obviously, you can’t possibly inflict even more of a loss on the
company or it might go out of business/not deploy UFB/all end in tears (delete
where applicable).

There’s only one word for this and as we’re a
family-friendly website I can’t use it, so let me just go for “hornswoggle”
instead.

I know this to be true because Chorus is still talking about
paying out 25 cents per share as a dividend, possibly the largest dividend payout
in New Zealand this year and a rate (given the current share price of $280)
that I haven’t seen since the early years of Telecom’s privatisation where the
US parent consortium took out more money than it paid year after year till the
coffers ran dry.

If Chorus can afford that level of dividend it can cope with
a Commerce Commission determination in the $8-$12/month mark and can spend a
bit of effort on sorting out its installation process so it doesn’t cost $3500
per install.

Several things need to happen and a review of the Telco Act
isn’t one of them.

Firstly, the government needs to step back and let the
market figure out what’s going on. This random intervention model doesn’t work
and just scares the investors (let’s remember, Chorus’s investors aren’t the
only ones in this game).

Secondly, Chorus needs to figure out how to install UFB
without it costing the earth. The other LFCs can do it – so can Chorus.

Thirdly, the Commerce Commission needs to get on and deliver
us a wholesale price that uses actual cost and not retail-minus as it is
supposed to.

Fourth, those government departments that are pushing Chorus
not to do anything useful with VDSL should butt out and let the company offer
the services its customers want – in the interim while we gear up for UFB, that’s
fast fibre. It’s going to be at least another three years before most of us
start to get UFB – that’s three years of training us up to demand UFB speeds
and the best way to do that is with faster copper products.

And if the government insists on pushing ahead with its
review (of an Act it introduced, let’s not forget) then it should use the
Commerce Commission’s work as a benchmark. After all, if we know what it
actually costs Chorus to deliver these services, isn’t that going to be just a
little bit important?

Eric Hertz

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Americans tend not to have a sense of humour, I’ve found. They take it all too seriously and don’t enjoy life as much as you’d expect.

Eric Hertz was not that kind of American. Instead, he drove a Chevy Camaro in Bumblebee Yellow that looked like it came from the Transformer movie. He laughed when I offered to lease him space on my iPhone charger during a Commerce Commission conference on termination rates. And he and his wife Kathy had become permanent residents, living life to the full in New Zealand as locals, not as temporary visitors.

If the news from today is borne out, Eric and Kathy are missing after their plane crashed in the sea off the west coast of the North Island. Searchers have returned to base for the night – they’ll resume in the morning but barring a miracle, this is a recovery mission, not a rescue.

It’s not overblown to say that Eric has lead 2Degrees to make dramatic changes to the New Zealand telecommunications space. Without 2Degrees we would be facing a duopoly in mobile telecommunications and wouldn’t have rollover minutes, shared data or any of the other innovations 2Degrees has brought to market.

The company has changed the landscape of competition for the New Zealand telecommunications market in an incredibly positive way and we as an industry are all the more poorer for today’s news.

Eric and Kathy could have come in, done the job and left for a life “back home” in North America. Instead, they’d become New Zealanders and made it a mission to travel and see as much of New Zealand as they could. They were as New Zealand as they could be.

Our sympathies and thoughts are with Eric and Kathy’s family and with the team at 2Degrees.

Would you like fries with that?

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Last week I called for a national digital architecture and I’ve
been having several email conversations about how to proceed with this somewhat
nebulous plan with a number of people far brighter than I am.

One thing seems certain – there’s a desire and a keenness to
get on with it, lest New Zealand be left behind.

Quite how far behind is evident in this blog post (“Computer
science in Vietnam”) which I strongly urge you all to read. It won’t take long,
unless like me you get struck dumb by what you’re reading.

 If we don’t come up with a way forward that brings all New Zealand with it, we’ll have to teach our kids how to say “hello and welcome to our beautiful country” for all the rich visitors who will journey here. Assuming we haven’t dug up all the natural beauty in the mean time, of course.

TUANZ calls for a national digital architecture

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Telecom is laying off a large percentage of its workforce and as awful as that is for those involved, the company needs to do this to become competitive in the marketplace.

We have the government investing over a billion dollars in the fibre network and a couple of hundred million in rural broadband, matched and exceeded by the industry’s own spend in the area, yet we don’t have any way of articulating just what that will do to the economy of New Zealand as a whole.

We have research which suggests that ICT will overtake tourism in terms of share of the GDP in the near future, yet we’re also told that only 30% of businesses have a website and a large percentage of business owners don’t see the benefits of digitising their companies.

We have some schools making tremendous use of technology in classrooms and other schools where parents lobby to ensure they don’t have to buy iPads for their kids.

We have politicians who still don’t understand the basics of how the internet works and who treat it as some kind of bargaining chip in negotiations with the US over trade access when ICT could become as large and as important to the New Zealand economy as dairying or dead animals.

If New Zealand is to take its place in the global digital economy we need to consider the ICT industry, the investment in infrastructure and in education and how we tie it all together, otherwise we will struggle to keep our heads up. We need to pull in the same direction and that takes coordination, it takes a strategy. It calls for a plan.

In 2008 TUANZ called for a national digital architecture to be formed, providing some kind of cohesion and coordination for the country as a whole and the time has come to revisit the issue. We need a plan to ensure we take advantage of the skills and experience we have, to invest in the areas that will provide a return and will provide growth in the economy. ICT is clearly the rising star, but we have to do more than pay lip service to it.

What would you like to see in such a plan?

Efficiently strangling us with red tape

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Government, in all its forms, is not renowned for its
understand of technology. History is littered with idiotic decisions founded on
a limited grasp of even the fundamentals of what technology can do and
prosecuted with a vigour usually reserved for flag ceremonies in schools, the
launching of a new naval vessel or the decision to build a statue of the
politician in question.

One of my favourite responses to technology from a
government would be from an anonymous Hamilton City councillor who couldn’t
understand what the fuss was all about with regard to metro-area fibre
deployments. Hamilton’s had one for years, he told me. Great, said I, what do
you use it for? Oh we monitor CBD burglar alarms with it.

Then of course we saw Melissa Lee (not Sandra as I originally had) and her cohort at the
so-called Skynet debate in parliament. She was a standout defender of the new
copyright legislation, forthright in her argument that any copyright
infringement was intolerable and pointing out that in South Korea the economy
is booming, thanks to such infringement. To top it all off she happily tweeted
that after a hard day’s legislating, she’d be going home for a glass of wine
and to listen to a CD of K-pop that her sister had sent her. One can only hope
it included PSY’s take on Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic”.

Now, however, we have a move designed to close a nefarious
loophole in our law, something which is causing government to quake in its
boots and is keeping Treasury officials awake at nights with the sheer horror
of it all. That’s right, you’re all taking your smartphones home with you without
paying fringe benefit tax.

It’s hard to know where to start with such drivel. Do we
attack it on the basis that it’s going to cost more to implement a tax on smart
devices than it would ever bring in as revenue? Do we point out the efficiencies
inherent in allowing staff to have such a device in the first place? What about
the revenue from all those personal apps we buy on our smart devices? How about
the benefits to the environment of giving someone a device which they can use
remotely so avoiding the need to drive into the city each day?

If the government decides to tax smart devices, companies
face two choices – either figure out a complex, costly, annoying model for
managing personal use (not just voice calls of course but also data consumption
– but let’s rule out data consumed via your home wifi) thus driving staff
members to forgo the whole idea in the first place, or simply don’t allow the
staff member to have a smart device at all. No company I can think of would
cheerfully absorb the cost of any such FBT so that’s ruled out right off the
bat.

And what about BYOD? How would any such tax apply in
reverse? If I bring my own iPad to work do I get some kind of credit on my
personal tax for using a personal item for work? Surely I should be forced to
account for the work time accrued when I use my own devices?

Stupidity aside, there is a very real risk that we will
damage our employees’ ability to work remotely, to use these devices as
thoroughly as possible and potentially get in the way of that “aha” moment when
a staff member, noodling around on a device at home, finds a new way to do
something more efficiently or even better, discovers a whole new service to
build a business around. We run the risk of employers deciding there’s no point
in issuing smart phones to staff because of the added red tape. We run the risk
of stifling innovation for the sake of potentially very few dollars more in the
bank.

Governments always trumpet their keenness to cut through the
red tape and make it easier for business to get on. Somehow, they seem to
forget that when dollar signs are involved.

Samsung launch and the fall and rise of BlackBerry

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Today Samsung has launched its Galaxy S4. It’s slightly taller, has a better screen and processor and the battery is much larger. The interface promises to be more intuitive and it even has a touch of science fiction in that it includes a translator for nine languages.

We don’t have pricing yet but it’ll be on par with currently pricing, I would imagine, and in the year ahead we’ll see millions of them sell to people all around the world.

But much like the iPhone 5 before it, the era of the big surprise has passed, at least for now. The phones are iterative versions of what’s gone before. Strictly speaking the Galaxy 4 should be termed the 3.1 – it’s not a wheels-up redesign, and why would it be? The Galaxy SIII is the most popular selling handset Samsung has and it’s the phone responsible for taking on Apple in its heartland.

We’ve reached a critical point in the lifecycle of the smartphone. The design has moved from buttons to touch screen, the format has gone from included clients to the user-chosen app model. The last great surprise of this smartphone regime was probably the iPhone 4 with its move from sculpted plastic to a slab hewn from pure technology itself. All since then has been expected, signaled, even telegraphed in advance.

There’s nothing wrong with this, just as there’s nothing wrong with the new Samsung phone. It’s a natural phase in the tech cycle and it will take someone else to come along with a new format to really surprise us again. Possibly it’ll be Apple when it finally decides not to build any more iPhones and opts for a new monicker and style, possibly it’ll be Google with its Glass approach. Whatever it is, it’ll need to be quite different, quite stand out to surprise us.

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What of the last great ruler of the smartphone market? What of BlackBerry?

I had a BlackBerry for many years. A BlackBerry Pearl – mostly because it had gorgeous voice quality and I could do radio interviews on it, but also for its size, its functionality and its long battery life. Sure, it had a browser that was designed by someone who’d never seen the internet, but it was a solid, capable business phone.

That was really BlackBerry’s problem. It was a business device that had, in the US market at least, bled out into the consumer market in lieu of competition. With nothing else coming close in terms of capability, BlackBerry took the world by storm and grew into a multi-billion dollar business.

I remember the first BlackBerry on the market. It looked like a label printer and had about as much functionality, but the nice BlackBerry chap I met (of course, he was from RIM before the name change) told me the design was its best feature. In his world the BlackBerry was a success because of how well it was designed, not because it was the only phone on which you could readily and easily access your email. He couldn’t quite understand why I barked with laughter at that and was most offended when I told him what I thought of BlackBerry’s design, but to my mind the BlackBerry was so popular precisely because it had no competition. It was, and always would be, a business phone not a consumer phone. When Apple ate its market in one gulp, BlackBerry had no comeback and has been in a kind of death spiral ever since.

I waited with something approaching horror for the announcement that it would be dumping its operating system and would no doubt announce it was taking up Windows Mobile, as Nokia did before it, but instead it made a different announcement, one that’s been lost in all the noise.

BlackBerry bought QNX, a company that makes embedded systems, and will use that as the basis for its BlackBerry 10 phone. While yet another smartphone OS is nothing to write home about, QNX gives BlackBerry a leg up in a very interesting market – that of embedded mobile systems.

We talk a lot about the Internet of Things and how 50 billion devices will connect to the internet, dwarfing the number of people online by a long chalk.

If BlackBerry plays its cards right, it could become the lead OS in the new embedded systems world. Cars, home security, air conditioning, refrigeration, irrigation, you name it, it’ll need a chip that can communicate with the outside world. All that is there for the picking and we’re sure to see a landgrab for the hearts and minds of our embedded brethren. We may yet see BlackBerry rise from the ashes.

Have you ever heard of the Telco Dispute service?

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How many of you have heard of the Telco Dispute Resolution
service?

I can tell you, it’s 13% of you (since I prompted you). If
you were unprompted, the number is closer to 2%.

In short, nobody knows the service exists, which is really
quite hopeless because without it you’d be completely at the mercy of telco
billing systems, faulty call centre records and the like.

TUANZ doesn’t recommend ISPs to members when they call. We
have no preference for providers and don’t hand out ratings for various ISPs –
what we do every time we’re asked is tell customers only to sign up with those
ISPs that are part of the scheme, because that way if there is a dispute you’re
assured of having an independent third party deal with the problem.

TUANZ believes
very strongly that any ISP worth the S in its name should belong. The cost for
smaller ISPs is $500 a year, so that shouldn’t be a problem for any provider.

There is no requirement for ISPs or telcos to join the
scheme. It’s entirely voluntary and entirely paid for by the telcos that belong.
When it’s used it works well, but last year according to the TDR annual report it received only 3,000 calls and of
those just under half were accepted as complaints or “enquiries” as they’re
known.

Compare that with the Australian Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman scheme which (between July
and September last year) generated nearly 38,000 complaints (a major drop from
the year before). That’s for one quarter – for the full year it’s closer to
150,000 complaints.

There are many reasons for the difference of course. The
Australian TIO model encourages complaints rather than resolutions (each key
word uttered by a customer calling to complain becomes a separate complaint, I’m
told), complaints to the TDR can only be accepted once a deadlock with the
telco has been reached and naturally we could cast aspersions about the
Australian ability to whinge. But when all is said and done the Aussie customer
knows about the scheme whereas the New Zealand customer – for the most part – does
not.

The Australian scheme is mandatory, is governed by its own
Act and costs A$30 million a year to run. The New Zealand scheme is voluntary,
governed by the Telco Carriers Forum (although it has its own Council, which
TUANZ sits on) and costs far, far less. I can’t find a public document that
includes costs so won’t reveal them here, but it’s described by
the Chair of the Council as costing “the least, by a very big margin, of all
industry based consumer dispute resolution schemes” in New Zealand.

By and large, New Zealand telcos do a far better job than
their Aussie counterparts of sorting out disputes. I receive a number of calls
from disgruntled customers and refer most of them on to the ISP in question,
where they are resolved relatively quickly. The TDR does the same – referring customers
back to their providers when a deadlock has yet to be reached. Often customers
will complain to the TDR before talking to their telco and they are politely
but firmly sent on to do the right thing.

Most of New Zealand’s customers are covered by the scheme as
they buy service from the larger ISPs and telcos. The problem telcos tend to be
the smaller operators and they tend not to belong. In essence, we’re policing
the wrong crowd.

The previous Minister of Communications, Steven Joyce,
indicated to the TCF that if it didn’t get complete voluntary membership then
he’d have to take a look at regulating the issue and requiring all telcos join
a scheme – a scheme, he promised, that would be costly and onerous and make the
real estate agent scheme look like kindergarten.

I don’t think we’re at that point. We have a very workable
scheme and now we need to ensure all ISPs belong to it. Besides, let’s remember
the industry we’re dealing with – any cost they incur will be borne by users at
the end of the day.

TUANZ is working with the TDR to encourage full
participation and we’ll be writing to non-scheme members asking them to sign
up. We’re also encouraging the telcos to put more information on their websites and on their bills (TelstraClear customers already have this – hopefully it will spread to Vodafone bills shortly and every bill should have the information on it somewhere). I’d like to see some of those banner ads display TDR information on a regular basis, much in the same way the TV channels all carry ads about the Broadcasting Standards Authority.

You can help as well. Check on the TDR website and if your ISP isn’t a
member let them know that it’s not acceptable. Write them an email or give them
a call and if the answer isn’t satisfactory, vote with your wallet. It’s vital all
customers have access to this kind of service, especially when they are
customers of an ISP that doesn’t seem to see the value in service.

 

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Diggers

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I’m a boy so I like diggers. Always have. There’s
something about giant machines moving large piles of dirt about the place
that’s just really cool. Man (always the male) versus nature, or some such.

If diggers are cool, tunnelling machines are even more
so. I left the UK before the Chunnel was built but remember watching with awe
as giant science fiction machine worms burrowed into the dirt under the Channel
and even shed a small tear when I read that the machines were entombed next to
the tunnel on completion. They’re simply too unwieldy to remove.

The New Zealand Herald carried a piece on our own
tunnel project and the machines that are coming from China to carry out the
work. Despite the gushing prose, this isn’t something we have “never seen
before in New Zealand” unless you exclude the Manapouri hydro scheme but it is
really quite impressive nonetheless.

This project will take two years and will dig a
motorway under Auckland from Owairaka to Waterview, a distance of 4.5km. The
cost estimate is a cool $1.4bn.

By now you’re probably wondering why I’m prattling on
about digging a tunnel. We need to ship things about the place, we have a lack
of rail infrastructure and the roads are really all we’ve got for moving goods
and people around Auckland, so the theory goes, which means more roads.

I drive a lot and I don’t have a problem with more
roads. I know that doesn’t exactly tick the green credentials box, but Auckland
is already a basket case for transport and having spent five years riding a
scooter to work (and being killed twice) unless we make some fairly dramatic
changes to the roads, rail and ferry infrastructure, cars are really the only
answer.

By now you’ll see where this is going. The Southern Cross
Cable, Pacific Fibre, the new Trans-Tasman cable and all the rest cost far less
than this tunnel, yet they’re not seen as economic drivers, but a drain on the
public purse, so they’re left to the private sector to undertake.

The economic lift from building a second NZ-US cable
has not been determined. Will it add anything? Will the UFB add anything? We’ve
got general figures from equipment makers that talk up just how much such
services add to the economy but there’s been little work done on it by anyone
other than those with a vested interest. I’d like to see some numbers please,
because if we can pour $1.4bn into a hole in the ground, surely $400m for a
cable that will help us present New Zealand as a content hub rather than a
content consumer would be money well spent.

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Back to the future indeed

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I was expecting a Top
Gun “the need for speed” or “take my breath away” marketing campaign but
Vodafone surprised me by going with Back
to the Future and the De Lorean instead. Either way, the announcement that
it was turning on a 4G LTE network wasn’t too much of a surprise seeing how
many people had spotted it being tested in the wild.

For a $10 premium over your existing plan (unless you’re
corporate in which case it’s already priced in), on account customers can
upgrade their software and connect to the LTE network.

Vodafone is deploying an 1800MHz network with plans to use
700MHz should it win a chunk in the spectrum auction at the end of the year.

For now that means the footprint is central Auckland (around
30% of the population is covered today) with plans for expansions within the
city, but also extending it to include Christchurch (in May), Wellington (July
or August) and then on to cover 40% of the population by the end of the year.

Currently there are six devices that can access Vodafone’s
LTE network – the latest iPhone, iPad and iPad mini, some of the Samsung Galaxy
SIII devices that have LTE written on the box, one of the Samsung tablets and
an HTC Windows phone. More are coming down the pipe and by Christmas there will
be around a dozen.

Also launched later this year will be category four devices.
The current crop of phones and tablets are only category three – the next ones
will be even faster.

So how fast is it? At the launch with a dozen users all on
the one cellsite we regularly saw speed tests of 50Mbit/s down, 25Mbit/s up.
Latency of around 25ms is to be expected at Vodafone’s head office, but the
speeds are astonishing. The Speed Test app graphical display only goes up to
20Mbit/s so you get to watch the needle swing round to flat line, then do it
again for upload and the report is complete in the time it takes my HSPA+ phone
to get a connection to run the app.

Today Vodafone says it has 65,000 handsets in use that are
able to make the jump to warp speed and they’ll be proactively calling every
one of them to tell them. By the year’s end they expect to see more than
100,000 users on the network.

This move raises two very interesting issues. From a user
perspective it’s great. Not only do we have access to a network that is very
fast, with devices already able to be used on it but we have a technology foot
race in play that should see the other two network operators look closely at
their rollout plans. Telecom had said it was trialling 4G but wasn’t going to
deploy a commercial launch this year. I imagine that will change quite quickly,
and NBR is reporting that Telecom is already talking about a commercial launch
this year. At the latest financial announcement there was no sign of the capex
needed to deploy 4G in Telecom’s network but given Simon Moutter’s view that
mobile is a core proposition for Telecom, I’m sure that will be forthcoming.

Which leaves 2Degrees in an interesting position as well. It
has the ability to upgrade to 4G quite quickly – it has the spectrum and the
network is new enough that I’m told it’s a software/card swap scenario rather
than redeploying kit to every celltower. Could 2Degrees beat Telecom to a
launch? Anything’s possible which is great news for us users. In the meantime
both Telecom and 2Degrees will have to do something to  keep customers happy and that’s likely to
involve pulling the price-point lever. I wouldn’t sign any long-term contracts
just at the moment – it’s all going to get rather interesting.

The other issue this raises is what will the government’s
response be? Given the government’s apparent view that copper is a competitor
to its fibre deployment, what will it make of LTE? If copper, offering speeds
of 15Mbit/s down and 1Mbit/s up is a danger that must be dealt with, what will
the response be to a technology that can do 100Mbit/s and 50Mbit/s up?

Today, with the right iPad, I could be getting speeds at least
on par with the speeds I’ll get from fibre when that finally becomes available
in my area in five years’ time. If copper must be regulated to keep the price
high in order to drive customers to fibre, surely products and services like
Vodafone’s new network will also throw a spanner in the works and if the
government doesn’t see fit to get involved, what does that say about its real
motivation for keeping Chorus’s copper price artificially high?

The government has chosen to keep prices for consumers high while supporting one telco over and above all others. If that’s not back to the future, I don’t know what is.