Telecommunications Amendment Act
On Wednesday appeared as part of the InternetNZ team before the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee regarding the Telecommunications Amendment Act. Our submission is here as a pdf.
As this is a more controversial issue than spam, censorship laws, I thought it could get somewhat more partisan than previous times I have appeared, but I was again really impressed with the session.
There were many really excellent questions from MPs on all sides, showing they understood the issues, and were very focused on how effective various solutions will be. Paul Swain, Shane Jones, Lockwood Smith, Chris Tremain and Maurice Williamson were the main contributors. We talked about the rural issues, the incentives for investment, the network bottleneck and the next generation network.
Despite spending many many hours swotting up for hardball questions, there turned out not to be any. The questions were all designed to get information rather than challenging the need for any change. So I read Bronwyn Howell’s 150 page submission for nothing đŸ™‚
Not just from our session, but also from the others such as Orcon and Ihug, I’m feeling pretty confident about some good improvements to the bill, when it is reported back. MPs were quite shocked to hear that if you move home and your ISP is Xtra then Telecom can have your broadband reconnected the day you move in, while if you are with another ISP you can be without broadband for 1 – 2 weeks. This is a classic example of the problem with vertically integrated monopolies.
One of the points we made to the committee was how the debate over just six months has moved from is the status quo acceptable, through whether or not LLU should happen (it is), also through whether or not Telecom should have some sort of separation (it is) to what sort of separation should there be (accounting, weak operational, strong operational, structural).
Getting the right separation scheme in place is the long term solution, rather than regulation which tries to make incumbents behave better.