|
Our cousins in New Zealand have always done things differently. Now, after at least two decades in CDMA isolation, TCNZ is opting for a GSM network. What next? Zippered flies for the sheep shearers? Or zippered backsides for the sheep?
You have to love New Zealand. Every now and then they are utterly insufferable, as when they win the World Cup in their preferred sport, rugby. Mind you, they haven’t managed to do that since 1987, although only a fool would bet against them doing so in France this year. Twenty-four years of being at best the second most powerful team in the world. Shoulders… chips.
In the meantime, they export their callow youth to Europe, to fill the spaces behind the bars of pubs and inns from Dublin to Dresden. Welcome they are too, despite their near total ignorance of European pub culture and an often tenuous grasp of European languages, including English.
Back home, of course, where their strangulation of vowels goes unnoticed, their telecom technology policy has a similar tendency to take an extended gap year. NZ has been held up as a model of telecom deregulation but even 20 years ago its policists admitted that they were removing regulations from more or less everything and then would wait to see what still stood.
Still standing after all these years is Telecom New Zealand, (aka ‘Telecom’ or ‘TCNZ’). It’s only a small monopoly in a small market to be sure but it is no less pervasive for all that. Like the famous rugby All Blacks, it has also under-achieved as the years have passed.
TCNZ committed its mobile arm at an early stage to non-GSM technologies, badgered into that choice by its US owners. Yesterday, after more than two decades where it stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the US wireless technology, it announced a shift to 3GSM.
One reason? Those youngsters we have already mentioned, staffing the drinking holes of Europe. 24 hours on the plane and a new mobile is required and in all likelihood a new SIM-card too. So it came to pass that the most mobile workforce on the planet were the most isolated in cellphone terms while on their travels. Isolated? Maybe it reminded them of home.
Jim Chalmers
|
