Ministry Conclusions and Comment
104. Although there are some limited services on which New Zealand compares favourably with other OECD countries, in general there is a significant gap between New Zealand pricing performance and that of countries in the top half of the OECD. There is significant potential to improve relative performance.
105. Broadband service pricing developments and uptake are mainly focused on services that have a maximum upstream speed of 128 kbps. Higher broadband service upstream speeds are available at significantly higher prices.
106. Advanced residential and small business user broadband telecommunications services with an extensive geographic coverage are now being progressively rolled out in a number of OECD countries. The main focus at present is Internet access and quality voice call services. In general the provision of video service offerings is still under development. In general, incumbents' wholesale broadband access services36 in other OECD countries are capable of supporting the provision of a range of advanced broadband services.
107. So called triple play residential user broadband service offerings, i.e. Internet access, VoIP and a range of video services,37 are starting to become available in some OECD countries. An important dynamic driving investment in the wider availability of such services appears to be the presence of vigorous infrastructure based broadband service competition, such as cable or copper based LLU.
108. Current overseas developments suggest that residential user triple play service delivery require broadband access link speeds of about 1 Mbps (uplink) /20 Mbps (downlink). Current DSL based residential user broadband service offerings in New Zealand are limited to about 128 kbps (up)/2 Mbps (down).
109. Telecom New Zealand is trialling residential user broadband based VoIP service, and has indicated that it plans to provide a range of advanced broadband services to residential users by early 2007 as part of the first phase of its residential telephone network service replacement.
110. At present, Telecom's wholesale unbundled bitstream broadband access services are only capable of supporting Internet access service. In particular, the 128 kbps upstream speed will not support the provision of advanced broadband services requiring IP bit stream quality of service control.
111. There is an ongoing need to benchmark New Zealand's performance relative to other OECD countries in delivering existing telecommunications services at cost based prices and promptly providing new and improved services.
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