Harbour concept

Econet has delivered a plan to the Commerce Commission, which has radio plans in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and Hamilton. Econet wants to be an infrastructure provider across the country. Econet intends to build until on par with Vodafone and Telecom.

Such is the craving for competition by the Ministry of Economic Development and the Commerce Commission, that they run the risk of having a pyric victory whereby the Vodafone fantasy of Vodafone perpetuating their GSM/W-CDMA technology in perpetuity with the regulator sucked in by the façade of competition as multiple brand names use their one network.

Every other spectrum vendor in the OECD (and including Nigeria) have given several years of spectrum harbour to those operators who are rolling out nationwide infrastructure. Econet is happy to agree to build and roll out conditions. In a high-penetrated market like New Zealand Econet has been effectively locked out of the market with no number portability, no collocation and ridiculous roaming prices. A new entrant is forced to roll out well over 30% of the country (i.e. Auckland or greater) to get an economic proposition off the ground.

Instead of choosing to encourage a “same technology framework” using the world stand low cost technologies. NZ has gone off on a rotten and pathetic technology agnostic approach, which directly plays into the hands of the incumbents, it causes non-standard, non-scalable pocket networks to be built with serve no purpose. NZ is the only country in the OECD world not to benefit from same technology competition. The MED needs to stand up and be counted and make a decision: go with GSM / WCDMA and try and get NZ to catch up with the rest of the world