At the beginning of this week John Key appeared to rule out any delay in the Chorus roll out of 69% of the country’s Ultra-Fast Broadband network by 2020.

To date, the telecoms industry has not seen the expected level of uptake for the ultra-fast data networking services that the UFB network enables.

If recent Chorus moves to force government to legislate an increase in the Commerce Commission’s pricing for copper-based services are successful, this will further slow business uptake of these services. This will be detrimental to the wider New Zealand knowledge economy.

Chorus’s pressure on government displays all the worst characteristics of the old, monopolistic Telecom prior to de-regulation. This is unsurprising when you realise that the old guard running Telecom under Teresa Gattung has resurfaced as key members of the management and strategy teams at Chorus.

Despite causing years of declining revenues, tanking profits and plummeting share prices in Telecom, the strategy of milking consumers and NZ business for as long as possible by stalling the arrival products which compete with the old copper network seems to be alive and kicking in Chorus.

To paraphrase Sartre, the more things change in the world of Telecom and Chorus the more they stay the same…

Read the full article here