I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
It is widely speculated that Telecom will soon move its corporate head office to Auckland.
About time Telecom’s focus moved from regulation.
Chairman Wayne Boyd said yesterday he expected the CEO to work in the country’s largest city. He shied away from saying the head office would also move north from Wellington, but once the CEO moves the head office is sure to follow.
Telecom is a hub of an expenditure ecosystem. Moving the Head Office is a very big deal for Wellington. Ironically, it’s often been suggested that Telecom has held such a move over Wellington City Council to ensure that they council doesn’t get too innovative on the communications front. More than a few people have emailed me today saying this maybe a nightmare situation for the Mayor.
But I think it’s actually great timing. It rams home the need to think about communications infrastructure at the local body infrastructure level. Just like roads, water and waste. Having great communications links is competitive advantage for a City. Wellingtons culture and spirit are seeing innovation grow everywhere. We need to attract and retain new types of businesses.
This lighting bolt may be just the catalyst for action.
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I covered the move last week in my Computerworld Friday FryUp newsletter, and it’s reasonably certain to come about. Needless to say, nobody in Wellington - and especially the Beehive denizens - will be very impressed.
Chris Niesche’s column has a more interesting item though, that probably should’ve got top billing: Telecom may not win the Powertel bid.
Well the writing is on the wall finally. To attract a top CEO who either doesn’t come from Wellington will be difficult. You are comparing the Wellington region with 449,000 and the Auckland region with four cities (should be one) with a population of 1.3 million. Wellington city has 180,000, Auckland city has 405,000. Auckland has better international communications so I just wonder why it has taken so long. Guys if Wellington was not the capital it would be Palmerston North by the sea!
A more important note - I am trying to get a fibre line at home and Vector is digging up a huge number of roads to lay fibre cable, standalone not through their gas pipes which they have been doing. Its to connect schools together and to the Internet and paid for by the government and local councils.
Problem is I live about 500 metres from where it is. However another option has come up. ISP’s can now resell UNS circuits which are replacing frame relay. Install $495, monthly cost $584, 2 megabits synchronous (2 Mbit down, 2 Mbit up. low latency, low jitter, multiple IP’s and is terminated in normal Ethernet). Will beat any ADSL speed any day of the week unless you live on top of an exchange. Now I realise this is not dirt cheap but it is better that what we have now in a lot of cases.
I was just talking to someone who said Telecom has not made public but will at their next shareholder meeting that AAPT has lost even more customers and it’s value will be written down even further.
And to think the other day that someone in the news was saying Teresa could get a good job overseas!
I think the move was effectively made a while ago and that this will not have much impact on Wellington at all.
Telecom does have 2000 employees in Wellington… if head offices moves it WILL have an impact. Given that roughly 70,000 people work in Welly CBD, that would mean a reduction of 0% to 3%.
Dermott, saying AAPT will have less customers and be written down more is like saying tomorrow the sun will rise. It’s a pretty safe bet from how I’ve seen their AAPT investment perform.
By the way, Rod, good presentation last night, the system looks better than I anticipated, can’t wait to use it :)
- JD
Johnny - My point is that Telecom have already shifted lots of people to Auckland. I somehow doubt they will shift a huge number of the remainder (I could be wrong). My understanding was that Gattung had effectively shifted her base there anyway.
Somehow, Wellington survived and there are still lots of great Telecom folk left here.
The whole Telecom saga is very interesting and when you here discussions about them from various media commentators you can sometimes wonder if we are all taking about the same company.
I heard Rod Oram talking to Larry Williams on the radio driving home last night.
Rod was saying Teresa didn’t do a bad job and that Telecom has the opportunity to become a supplier of services 3rd party suppliers.
Strange comments I thought because I have spoken to a number of people who are underwhelmed with Teresa, and everyone I speak to in the Internet related area says Telecom’s business model in practice as far as Internet goes has been to -
1. Control
2. Drag the chain with respect to other ISP’s supply of services
3. Provide an inferior service compared with similar sized countries around the world
Talk is cheap as the old saying goes, and Telecom has consistently tried to control rather than taking the opportunities to control through providing a service so good that people would not use other services. Teresa and the management team at Telecom have been totally unsuccesful in convincing the board with ideas that would grow the business and thus keep both customers and shareholders happy.
You only have to look at the complaints from other ISP’s to see a reflection of the problems. Now this is no different to how Telstra works in Oz; the difference there is that other people have built their own networks whereas here everyone has to go through Telecom.
The unbundling of the local loop will be the biggest shift in the NZ economy since the days when the restrictions on how much money you could take overseas were lifted.
May it happen quickly.
Dermott: you may be able to get hooked up with Vector, especially if you can band together and bring in other customers than yourself. That network is being built with Digital Strategy funding and will lots of capacity.
Juha, thanks for that. The main reason I want a fibre connection at home is for offsite backups. The problem is the Vector connections stops 500-700 metres away and it would be costly to run it especially for me.
As its residential I cannot think many of my neighbours will want to pay for a fibre connection.
Still I think UNS may have some merit.
Vector seem to be laying cable in strange places. They did our street at work and I cannot think of anyone other than me that would want it.
Depends on how Telecom implements the UNS stuff. They’ve been very quiet about it, so you may find it’s technology dragged out of resthome like DDS or frame-relay and sold to you in 64kbps steps (sigh). 1,920kbit/s kind of sucks in 2007 anyway, although it’s bound to be better than shared DSL bandwidth. Well, I hope it is.
What I meant about sharing was to ask if there’s a provider partner willing to extend the network with a “spur” or similar thing towards you, and then resell to to the neighbours. Won’t be direct fibre as such, but say 10Mbit/s Ethernet… that’d be nice.
Yes the speeds are not super fast and although it happened in October 2006 I only heard about it from my Orcon account manager on Wednesday. I guess time will tell.
Interesting article on Herald web site this morning by Chris Barton
Here is the link
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10422894
I think he gives a pretty good account of what we have all been suffering from.
Chris has longer experience than I have but even so, I can vouch for what he writes, having been through much the same myself. Good summary made better by Chris being one of the few people left who remembers what actually happened over the past few years leading up to the mess we’re in at the moment.
Heard today that the floors in Tory Street are decimated. Massive movement of staff to the land of traffic over the past 2 months.
The Auckland Ascendancy gathers momentum!
Rod, I like the land of traffic comment but it is so true. Here’s the way to fix it (not all suggested items may be considered politically correct by the regime but they do work in other places).
1. It’s no longer a God given right to buy a car. If you are here temporarily doing studies you have to use public transport.
2. If you are retired you can do what you want.
3. If unemployed, you have all the time in the world - public transport or walk.
4. Your 16 year old son and daughter don’t need to be driven to school.
All of the above would cut 20% or more of cars off the roads in Auckland and probably other bug cities in NZ.
It could all be controlled by electronic detection devices in the cars.