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In a ground-breaking move, the CC as dictated that Telecom's UBS wholesale offering just isn't cutting the mustard and that they must now give full-speed access to other providers.

In another ruling, they've stated the bleeding obvious when making it clear that there's no justification for Telecom to charge business customers more for the same level of DSL service that residential users receive. It's not like I (and other commentators) haven't been pointing this out for years already.

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So, the NZ Herald has come out with the bold headline Internet faster, cheaper by Xmas" - but I think they're being terribly optimistic.

For a start, the changes are likely to affect full-speed business users far more than regular folks who just want to surf the web at home in the evenings.

We must also remember that the main beneficiary of these rulings will be Telstra, who appear to be straining at the bit to get more into the business broadband marketplace. Let's not forget that Telstra is the Australian equivalent of Telecom NZ so they're not about to charge one cent less than they have to for any service so prices won't fall through the floor.

And as for that "faster" claim -- don't bank on that either.

You see the CC, in their infinite wisdom, have made no ruling on the minimum upload speed offered. This means that it's likely Telecom will be able to offer full DSLAM speeds for the download but tweak things so as to maintain a 128Kbps upload speed - something that could significantly compromise the actually throughput of those higher downlaod speeds.

Would Telecom do this?

I couldn't possibly comment on that.

I also suspect that Telecom aren't really crying in their beer over this decision -- because it instantly opens up a justification for hiking DSL latency sufficiently to scuttle third-party VOIP services like Skype.

"Don't blame us" they'll say. "It's the Commerce Commission's fault that you can't use Skype any more -- they forced us to hand full-speed DSL connections over to competitors and now those competitors are screwing up the latency"

This will, of course, play nicely into Telecom's own plans to offer VOIP services and I'm sure they'll come up with some justification as to why their own service works in this hi-latency environment while 3rd-party ones don't.

Of course I could just be overly cynical, but perhaps not.

After all, I know that I used to be a cynic, but now I'm not so sure :-)

What do you think these rulings by the CC will do to the provision of DSL broadband in NZ? Is it opening the door to greater competition or simply giving Telecom the chance to wind down service levels and blame it all on someone else?

Go have your say in The Aardvark Forums

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