14 March 2006

Vodafone CE opposes more telecommunications regulation

Yes, it's true. The CE of one of Telecom's major competitors has been quoted in the NZ Herald saying:
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"If we want true broadband, we're not going to get it by regulation alone. We need investment."
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Of course, unlike almost every other competitor, Vodafone has a parallel network to Telecom. It was built from scratch starting in 1993 with BellSouth, later bought out by Vodafone, and expanded. Vodafone went from Telecom having a mobile phone monopoly (since 1987) to sharing the market roughly 50/50, and good on it. There are frequencies held by Telstra Clear and others to build more mobile networks, but the government has already taken steps to force Vodafone and Telecom to share their networks with competitors. You see, when a mobile competitor reaches 5% coverage with its own network, it can force a competitor to sell it wholesale capacity to get nationwide coverage. That was a little deal stiched up so that the Maori/Zimbabwean consortia set up - Econet could operate. Here it is in the Herald bleeting on about how it needs the regulatory environment to compete, not good enough to get discounted radio spectrum. You might have noticed that five years after getting its nice little cheap spectrum deal, there is little to notice from Econet.
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So you see, Econet is another second-hander - a business demanding another business share its property, for it to exist.

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