The improvement in service is solely down to technology changes most of which was put in place prior to the sale of Telecom (The planned replacement of the last manual exchange was for 1996 – it eventually happened in 1999). Prior to digital exchanges that could be remotely operated people had to actually go to the exchange, wire up the connection and then go to the house to check to see that it was on and fix things if it wasn’t. Organising getting people out to do the job could take awhile. Now, the lines can be turned on and tested at the same time that the order is put through.

Prior to the 1980s cabling was wrapped in lead, pitch, hessian, steel, hessian and more pitch. The internal wires were wrapped in paper. The new technology of plastic wrapped cabling with colour coding mad it vastly cheaper and faster to lay them. This made for a change in the way things were done, instead of running one line per house plus expected growth and faults two were. Again, this was done prior to the sale of Telecom.

Back before privatisation planning to replace a cable would happen when the cable got to about 75% full. While at TestraClear a couple of years ago I had a customer that got a lot of cross talk, bad internet connections etc etc. It was a Telecom line and obviously faulty so I rang Telecom to see what could be done about it and the answer was nothing. The line was full, chocker, not a spare pair at all and there was no plans for replacement.

Want to know when fibre to the cabinet started getting laid out? It was back in the 1980s. Telecom in the early 2000s started taking that fibre out and replacing it with copper so that they could run ADSL out from the exchange. The cheap option rather than the better option of running ADSL from the cabinet.

In reality, the telecommunications service in NZ has been going backwards since privatisation and it’s been costing us huge amounts of money and opportunities.

State ownership of Telco’s isn’t the answer unless the question was “Can I have a Telco service where it takes 2-3 months to get a new line installed”

Noko

Interestingly I heard a BBC documentary about an African medical centre operating across several viillages that used tin cans to craft directional antenna for a WIFI network between the medical centre and a Village

Many are avoiding doing land line based systems and jumping straight to cell networks.

Certainly cheaper to roll out but limited compared to a full land based system. Still, their systems do need to start somewhere and there’s nothing wrong with a cell based system.

If you’re a telco reliant on toll voice services, you have to be worried by current trends in VoIP.

Just another reason why the network is going to have to come back into state ownership with services provided by anyone with a server, ie, quite literally, anyone once we get FttH.

Now, if I could just ring up government ministries, departments, banks, etc etc on Skype or some competitive and compatible equivalent.

This applies to most of the developing world. Many are avoiding doing land line based systems and jumping straight to cell networks.

This is a testament to decentralisation and how well it works. Instead of stringing up thousands of kilometres of telephone lines to connect villages, they install a cell tower instead. The same is happening in the developing world with energy generation, where there are frequent blackouts from either lines being knocked down or not enough plant capacity. Small scale hydropower and wind turbines power the batteries of cellphones in these places. It’s great to see the developing world can take something back from us after we have exploited them so much.