Broadband Warriors

The NZ Herald on Saturday has a good series of articles grouped together as Broadband Warriors.

They have one general article on how local loop unbundling works, and also profiles of Telecom’s Bruce Parkes and Grant Forsyth who has just finished up with Telstra-Clear to go work for British Telecom.

Bruce has a good sense of humour and I had to laugh at how he dealt with Telecom being compared to Sauron in Lord of the Rings – the evil empire. He turns it around by claiming Telecom is Minas Tirith defending itself against the Orcs.

There is one part I sort of agree with Bruce on. He says “We’re not saying Telecom shouldn’t provide access to its network. What we are saying is the best way to achieve that is not necessarily through setting up an adversarial regulatory system.”

Indeed that may often not be the best way. But it may be the only way! Telecom has gone out of its way to provide very unhelpful and inadequate wholesale service to companies wanting network access. The debacle in rolling out UBS was probably a last straw for many.