NZ Gets Serious About Competition in Telecoms. Splits NZ Telecom

Sponge Bob

Another hould the comms bill Noel moment

In addition to the jolly good idea of sending our regulation to Brussels Nole should note that the NZ government is fed up with performing slightly better than Ireland in BB league tables from the OECD.

Rather than Do the Dempsey EG

......always pretend all is well and shure am I not great shure at all and shure we are great and shhure and shuuuuuuure and don't say something bad about me becuase shure I am Ireland and if you say something bad shure about me you are dissing yoru own country shure and I am a republican man shure from the WAN TRUE republican party shure and we in FF are the people and I am the country and if you dis me you dis the country and you dis the people and on and ON and ON ad nauseam.

In NZ the government did seriouusly threaten their incumbent and their resident incumbent WILL split . This is called a POLICY Noel , once you shake the mange and fleas off it

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/27/telecom_nz/

A

In May it emerged that the Kiwi government was planning to drive through a series of measures to force Telecom to unbundle the local loop and increase competition

followed by

B

Among the proposals outlined today is the idea of creating a level playing field for all retail operators - including Telecom - with the whole separation overseen by an independent monitoring group.

Further details of Telecom's plans are due to be published early in August.

Meanwhile Eircom are still laughing all the way to the bank at Dempsey and his Comms Bill (where the **** IS it Noel) and at that mangy poodle we call a regulator.

Ronan|Raven

More about it here http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3714821a13,00.html

I hate to be moving home and leaving my nice 3.5/512 connection behind

eircomtribunal

(Looking forward to seeing you..)

Asked if Telecom had jumped before it was pushed, Ms Gattung replied: "Let's just say we're reading the tea leaves."

Unfortunately there are no tea-leaves to be read from Dempsey and Goggin/Doherty&Co, as they are clueless and too busy making up excuses for their failure. Our so-called minister for communications reads the tea-leaves of the eircom PR spinsters and fabricates the government's "broadband goals" accordingly.

When in March 2004 Minister Dermot Ahern had directed ComReg to work for an Irish broadband penetration equal or better than that of the EU-15 by mid-2005, that meant reaching around 12 subscriptions/100 or 500 000 broadband subscribers by mid 2005. (Ahern never talked about a goal of 350 000 subscriptions – this is an invention by ENN's Ciaran Buckley who totally misunderstood a different Ahern announcement that the MANs and the group broadband scheme would make broadband available to 350 000 users, who would otherwise never have it available).
ComReg never worked for this goal, but simply adopted Eircom's 100 000 goal by year end 2004 and 250 000 by year end 2005 (as can be seen from their reporting back to the DCMNR!).
When Dempsey saw that Irish broadband take-up would not reach 350 000 by mid 2005 (which was not the goal of the policy directive), he changed the goal from the directive's goal (of being equal to the EU-15 average) of 500 000 broadband users by mid 2005 to his new goal: “Forget about 100,000 broadband subscribers as a target - forget about 200,000. I want to see an industry target of a minimum of 400,000 broadband subscribers achieved by the end of 2006 – by the end of 2006."
When asked in the Dail about the reduction of the goal, he had the brass neck to say:

In late 2004, I set a Government target of 400,000 broadband subscribers to be achieved by end-2006. Subsequently, broadband subscriber numbers have grown by 73%, in the nine months since I set that target, to reach almost 174,000 by the end of July 2005.

No downgrade of broadband targets has taken place. The target set in late 2004 represents a significant, but achievable challenge

500 000 by mid 2005 vs 400 000 by end 2006 – sure that is no downgrade!

In Feb 2005 our minister is, according to a ENN interview

still confident the 500,000 broadband target can be reached by the end of 2006.

Mixing up his dismal "goal" with his a little less dismal "challenge" he was talking about at the TIF conference.

When in his recent interview with Max Kelly of ENN (who also uses the totally wrong 350 000 broadband subscriber goal – but he is not alone with that misconception, even our Sponge and Labour's Tommy Broughan fell for it) Dempsey is asked about the goal:

..your predecessor Dermot Ahern set a target of 350,000 broadband users by June 2005 and you set a target of 400,000 by the end of 2006. Is that a bit of a soft target -- only 50,000 extra?

he even talks about what a daring goal he set with the 400 000 by end 2006 (how sooo brave! When Eircom planned for 500 000 DSL users by end 2007 – falsely claiming that would bring us above the EU average – Dempsey's 400 000 broadband "goal" for end 2006 is just reformatting eircom's goal of keeping Ireland at second last place of the EU-15.

Minister Dempsey: Not at the time it was set, I have to say. I think at the time I came into office, we had less than 100,000 broadband subscriptions and it was in that context that I knew that the target that Dermot had set was not going to be achieved. We sat down and had a look at it and the first statement I made -- I think it was at a [Telecommunications Industry Federation] conference -- I set the challenge of 400,000 and quite a few people said to me: "This isn't going to happen, it's not going to work. Don't be putting yourself up to be beaten." But it looks like a false target now, and people will allege that, because we are actually going to achieve it.At the time it was set it was not an easy target,

What a minister: When the minimalist (don't forget that this comes from a gov that kept telling us we'd soon be in the top decile of the OECD countries with regards to broadband) and decent goal of reaching at least the average of the EU-15 with regards to broadband, doesn't seem to be reached, does he change gear, take new steps, asskick and/or empower the regulator – who reports back about successfully reaching the incumbent's dismal broadband goals instead of the directive's goals (I have that in black and white through FOI; and alone the Commissioners' disregard for the policy directive should be reason enough for getting rid of them in one way or another) – in short, do something to reach the goal? No, he bravely sets a new goal, that will leave Ireland at the bottom place in Europe. And to top it up he even publicly denies having changed the goal.

Eircom is surely reading correctly in the tea-leaves of the minister: This gov will do nothing that could upset mighty O'Reilly or the CWU.
P.

Sponge Bob

eircomtribunal wrote:

What a minister:

A legend. An absolute legend. Did you hear Noel O Flynn appealing for "joined up thinking" on the national airwaves this morning ??

Eircom is surely reading correctly in the tea-leaves of the minister:

As are the Markets.

When NZ THREATENED a Comms Bill to make LLU a reality in May 2006 the price of NZ Telecom shares dropped by 20% since then because the MARKETS reckoned the NZ government was serious about competition and would do something. In the end NZ telecom jumped themselves and the slide was halted yesterday.

When Noel 'threatened' eircom with a Comms bill the idea of Noel being serious, and of Comreg being competent and serious and with new powers they would use was so funny that the price of Eircom shares ACTUALLY ROSE instead of falling.

Now there is joined up thinking at its finest.

Ronan|Raven

Sponge Bob wrote:

As are the Markets.

When NZ THREATENED a Comms Bill to make LLU a reality in May 2006 the price of NZ Telecom shares dropped by 20% since then because the MARKETS reckoned the NZ government was serious about competition and would do something. In the end NZ telecom jumped themselves and the slide was halted yesterday.

When Noel 'threatened' eircom with a Comms bill the idea of Noel being serious, and of Comreg being competent and serious and with new powers they would use was so funny that the price of Eircom shares ACTUALLY ROSE instead of falling.

Now there is joined up thinking at its finest.

Sure is, the NZ government is deadly serious about forcing telecom if they werent going to play ball, and it has worked forcing telecom to make this latest move. i wish out bunch of spoofers were able to come across as anything other than laughable.

jwt

Asked if Telecom had jumped before it was pushed, Ms Gattung replied: "Let's just say we're reading the tea leaves."

Similar thing happened in the UK with Ofcom.

And of equal note was head of BT comment at Comreg do last year where he noted that firm reliable and predictable regulation by Ofcom allowed them to forecast and plan for the future.

He indicated that this was preferable to muddy regulation even if the regulation was unfavourable to BT.

John