Thoughtful editorial by the NZ Herald yesterday about Telecom’s XT woes, its culpability and the possible role of government.
Two sentences I particularly agree with:
“Few things are guaranteed to raise ire as much as a useless piece of expensive technology.”
“There comes a point when nothing can compensate for a piece of equipment that does not work when needed.”
I also agree with Ernie Newman of the Telecommunication Users Association (TUANZ) who says that if Telecom did not do something drastic to help its customers, it was time for the Government to step into what was a national economic issue.
But what I don’t agree with is the Herald’s conclusion that:
such a situation would exist only if Telecom enjoyed monopoly status in the mobile-phone market. Such is not the case, with Vodafone and the fledgling 2degrees offering competition. That means it falls to Telecom’s customers to punish the company if they so wish.
Three points to make here.
The XT network is part of New Zealand’s core infrastructure. People rely on it for communication; social, business and emergency. Competition does not overturn this. Steven Joyce is moving in this direction by indicating that mobile performance standards may be regulated under the TSO (the old Kiwi share). We agree but regret it is necessary.
Then there’s consistent standards. The failure of 111 has drawn attention to the nature of our critical infrastructure. Too many NZers rely on mobile phones for most, if not all their calls for this not to be an issue. Are there consistent standards for delivery of service to NZers? Are there consistent standards that a network must meet in order to remain viable?
And a government that takes information access seriously ought to be procative about ensuring progress towards universal availablity and reliability.
And finally, who should be representing the voices of New Zealand people on these issue? TUANZ has a mandate to represent the players in the marketplace. It does a good job, but its mandate isn’t to speak on behalf of New Zealand domestic consumers.
Consumer NZ has made one statement to my knowledge, advising XT customers to contact Telecom if they have problems or rival networks to negotiate the best deal. That’s fine, but it’s not really sticking up for people is it.
As for the Ministry of Consumer Affairs! What is it that they do again? Under Heather Roy?
That leaves the Labour Opposition.
In Australia, the Communications Minister Stephen Conroy recognised there was a gap early on and established (and properly funded) a new body to represent consumers; ACCAN, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network.
This is what they do, and I think New Zealand should consider whether it needs a similar body.
ACCAN is the peak body that represents all consumers on communications issues including telecommunications, broadband and emerging new services. ACCAN provides a strong unified voice to industry and government as consumers work towards availability, accessibility and affordability of communications services for all Australians. Consumers need ACCAN to promote better consumer protection outcomes ensuring speedy responses to complaints and issues.
Here we go again – another attack on a soft target. Brilliant! Don’t ever think of criticising the government wasting a whole $1.5 billion on fast youtube for inner city Aucklanders – oh no – this is much more effective.
Also maybe take the time to google utility outages in Australia such as electricity, roads, rail, telecommunications, water – you might find it isn’t quite what you talk it up to be.
Until you start focussing on your actual opponents instead of trying to get cheap headlines by kicking a sick animal you are destined to remain right on those opposition benches.
Hi Clare
I agree with most of this but would make one point. Although TUANZ comprises mostly large business users, we have a number of individual members aas well (around 150 from memory.) But nmore importantly we do have oversight of the residential market because (1) resuidenmtial users are our corporate members’ customers and their connectivity is as important as our members’ own, and (2) the people on our Board, and our wider membership, are all residential users in their private capacity. Also we have a good working relationship with other groups like ConsumerNZ and federated Farmers.
So we do have the individual consumer as well as corporates at heart – the interests of the two groups are practically identical.
Cheers Ernie
Hi Clare,
Consumer NZ has made many statements regarding the XT Network outages. It was pressure from Consumer NZ that ensured Telecom would honour its Consumer Guarantees Act obligations and allow affected customers to exit their XT contracts without penalty. We also have advice on our site http://www.consumer.org.nz. Consumer NZ along with TUANZ has played a significant role in the Drop the Rate Mate Campaign to bring down mobile termination rates charged by Telecom and Vodafone, which hopefully will bennefit all consumers. We have also had victories with our complaints to the Commerce Commission over Telecom’s breaches of the Fair Trading Act in its promises about Xtra and broadband speed delivery.Those complaints resulted in millions being paid back to customers. We also run an annual ISP reliability rating survey, which involves more than 15,000 of our members.
I’d be happy to talk through Consumer’s involvement in this signficant area of communication.
Sue
Hi Clare,
The point you missed was to challenge the perception that there is now competition in mobile. Telecom does have monopoly status – at least in the south island. 88% of Dunedin students are on Telecom prepaid service(97% of Auckland students on Vodafone). If a disgruntled Dunedin student who pays $10 a month for 1000 text messages switched to Vodafone, it would cost him $200 to send the sames texts to his mates who remained on Telecom. 70% of NZers are prepaid customers and don’t have a real choice, mobile provider is defined by the network their friends are on. Ernie has a great video on his website showing the problem.
Bill
Clare, I’m genuinely mystified by your posting. Are you really suggesting that the answer is for the gummint to set up another agency because the existing agencies don’t work? Is that the extent of the political response from Labour?
There’s lessons to be learnt here first of all. During the recession a lot of the expenses were scrutinised and things which weren’t really necessary, were cut out. The reason unemployment levels won’t go back to their pre-recession levels is because businesses have realised that they can do as much as they were doing with less staff.
So the lessons:
* The 111 service, while pretty solid, is not as solid as it should be. Also, it wasn’t just the service that went down but also a fault in the way it was reported (or not reported) to stakeholders (i.e. emergency services).
– Review the 111 infrastructure.
– Give Telecom a great big kick to the kidney’s – First and foremost, the stakeholders need to know what’s happening.
* The XT network has experienced major outages.
– The commerce commission were quite right jumping in and making sure that Telecom knew that they could not hold people to their contracts if Telecom were unable to keep up to their end.
– Telecom can put the blame on Acatel-Lucent all they want. If they’re selling the service, it’s still their responsibility to make sure that the service is up to specification.
What we need to learn is that Telecom is a cash cow. Or rather, we’re all cash cows, Telecom is a milking machine. Telecom is turned into a large company who’s main concern is to it’s share holders. Not to it’s customers. Look at the price of ADSL in NZ at the moment.
Clare
Good to see the blog from Bill McCabe at 2degrees. They and everyone else should be very happy that the mobile termination undertakings include zero rated SMS (bill and keep). Presumably, if the Commission’s recommendation is accepted by the Minister, 2degrees will then be free to offer customers alternative texting plans which deal to the purported issue. Bizarrely, it will then be cheaper for a mobile operator to terminate a text on a competitor’s network than its own (which the Commission estimates would cost 0.95c per text)! I can’t see how regulation of mobile termination could possibly improve on that.
All the best
Tom Chignell
GM Corporate Affairs
Vodafone New Zealand
Ah, yes, competition – making life more expensive. Two networks cost twice as much as one. That’s basic mathematics. One network can also be more reliable than multiple independent networks because, for the same price, you can have more backups.
More reason to bring the network back into government ownership.
Well, kinda – it’s GSM now and the reason why Telecom moved from CDMA. If you want global roaming then your mobile network needs to be GSM. But that doesn’t mean that you will get roaming or even be able to call someone on another network. My nephew just bought a 2Degrees mobile as his Vodafone mobile wasn’t working. He can’t call anyone outside of 2Degrees which defeats the purpose of owning a phone.
One thing that really intrigues me about this xt problem is that I don’t think that we are being told the whole story
Paul Reynolds has stated publically I believe that auctel-lucent are world class etc etc blah blah and that approximately 1500 of these systems have be installed worldwide please correct me if I’m wrong
The disconnect for me is that after the second outage I would have sourced the world for a spare rnc unit had it freighted quick smart to Christchurch and swapped the whole lot over
Even if I had to work around the clock , than spend time checking what the hell was wrong with the first one, able to take my time without further inconvenience to the customer and no more egg on face
The money that telecom has lost with the continued extra outages and loss of face befuddles me they have highly paid and highly skilled engineers flying in from all over the world what for? Why hasn’t some asked that obvious question? It been happening over the course of a couple of months more than enough time to source a spare quality check it and install it . so what is really going on
Just seems a wee bit sus to me your thoughts
Last thing NZ needs is another quango. Good to see TUANZ and Consumers Institute defending themselves against your criticism. Civil society needs to be strong – setting up govt quangos in competition with them undermines civil society
Clare, Stephen Conroy is a corrupt egomaniac, who in true Australian tradition is both Telecommunications Minister and jaw-droppingly ignorant of telecommunications from a technical point of view. He’s the worst thing to happen to the Australian telecommunications industry in, well, ever.
Holding him up as some sort of example to be emulated shows shockingly poor judgement.
Clare, might I suggest you do some research into consumer/utility cooperatives, instead of coming up with having a toothless quango.
Giving consumers a real democratic say in the running of a utility company may be the answer. People put a lot of money into using these services, but get no real concrete say.
The first half of the title of this thread is redundant – Telco consumers already have a voice: Ernie Newman and TUANZ.
Calling for govt intervention is a kneejerk reaction by many as soon asthey encounter a setback in life.
An alternative is to open up the market and let someone better give Telecom a run for its money. Which, I believe, is what is happening now, without govt interference.
Which will never happen because it costs too much to run out the infrastructure.
Then your beliefs are wrong. The government has been “interfering” in the market ever since they realised that private telecommunications industry wasn’t doing what they thought it would do when they sold off Telecom and, in fact, the reverse was happening – ie, the network was degrading. Your getting more activity now because Labour unbundled the local loop and National promised $1.5b in subsidies (Labour also had subsidies promised).
“Which will never happen because it costs too much to run out the infrastructure.”
I decided I needed to clarify that.
The telecommunications market was opened up in the late 1980s. We didn’t suddenly get a huge influx of telecommunications suppliers because running out a network is more expensive than private companies are willing to pay and the return, if they have to pay for the network themselves, is somewhere between non-existent and negative. Telecom has been making a huge profit because the network was already in place and paid for by the NZ taxpayer.
@ Millsy. I don’t disagree. I think we should float some ideas. Care to expand?