Recommended Action
117. We recommend that you:
- Note that 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, and there is significant potential to improve relative performance.
- Note that relative performance in residential broadband service, assessed by use of an interim comparison methodology, was ranked in the top half of OECD relative performance, but that broadband uptake is still low compared to other OECD countries.
- Note that relative performance in 2 Mbps data link service was ranked in the top quartile of OECD performance.
- Note that New Zealand broadband service pricing developments and uptake are mainly focused on services that have a maximum upstream speed of 128 kbps, but that higher broadband service upstream speeds are available at significantly higher prices.
- Note that the provision of advanced broadband services requires uplink speeds significantly greater than 128 kbps.
- Note that 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.
- Note that 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.
- Note that a draft of this report was provided to Telecom, TelstraClear, Vodafone and TUANZ and a number of changes were made to reflect their comments.
- Agree that this report be publicly released.
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