NZ Internet, Media and Business
iPhones may be sold by Telecom?
My head is going to explode.
However AT&T is also struggling with a similar customer service reputation to Telecom’s, and so the price a telco pays for selling the iPhone (kickbacks to Apple) is the price you have to pay to be associated with Apple.
Telecom is launching something - I’m not really sure what it is, but apparently it will be some sort of Business Oriented Internet plan/ISP - where you get bundled internet access, hosting and things like Xero.
Business broadband plans will be “slightly differently priced” …
I read that as “more expensive”, but gee I’d pay anything for half decent NZ internet access - maybe even set up a business specifically to get it to my home.
and the services they encompass will also be different, she says. “There will be some guarantees about helpdesk and support.”
Good. Indeed I do not know why more businesses don’t follow Trade Me’s example and set up 0900 (paid) customer service lines. When I want help, I want a really competent human to immediately answer the phone 24/7.
The business Internet service will register domain names for customers and offer to develop and host their websites. It will also provide managed e-mail services suitable for businesses and online backup.
Hang on - why on earth would we want to get Telecom to provide those services?
Domain names, well maybe. But develop websites? Telecom outsourced their own unmitigated disaster of a website, so why would we not use any number of the excellent NZ design and development shops?
As for hosting, well let’s see what Xero themselves do…
Currently Xero is being hosted at Rackspace, in Houston Texas. (Follow that first link for all sorts of other fun stuff about Xero.com’s presence.)
Now - and this is really important for any Telecom employees involved in this effort - go to that Rackspace site. When you get there for the first time a popup appears - a real live person is actually offering to chat with you.
Close that down and browse the site - it is all about “fanatical support”. View the video testomonials, check out the offers and go ahead - order up a server and try them for real (or maybe just call some of their customers)
That’s the standard to aim for - fanatical customer service, 24/7. That’s what you’d need to offer for this service in order to make a difference, and sadly you’d need to do it at prices that are competitive with getting services straight from the USA. (and that’s not a lot).
So - overall - it is good that Telecom is targeting small businesses, and I hope that they’ll stick to investing in providing reliable, speedy access to the internet and not get diverted into competing away from their core.
Falafulu Fisi asks an excellent question to the previous post on Auckland Airport:
“Aren’t both Auckland Airport & Telecom private companies? Why would you want to say that the government is an interventionist regarding the CPPIB attempt to buying shares in the Auckland Airport but not saying the same thing about Telecom?
I am a defender of property rights, and the state has no right at all to meddle in the affairs of private businesses such as Telecom or Auckland Airport. That decision to sell or not to sell is entirely up to the rightful owners (ie, the Airport Shareholders) and not those Commissars in Wellington .
That was a great question, but I feel I am being entirely consistent here.
I am a fan of Govnerment intervention when the market is so inefficient and the company is out of control that the other stakeholders (beyond shareholders) are under threat, and unable to do anything about it due to monopoly power.
I’ve been wandering around NZ this week and frankly the broadband situation is beyond a joke - it is shameful crime that has left us in the dark ages of the internet.
There is a very well run dot com that I visited yesterday that is unable to even hold phone calls over Skype to the UK or USA as their connection keeps dropping out. This means increased costs, but even more importantly, that they are not part of the global internet business community that lives, wheels and deals on Skype. (Try putting together a 6 way phone call using traditional services at a moment’s notice.)
Now their customer base is almost entirely overseas, but they should be able to operate from NZ. But despite Wellington’s other advantages they would be not without cause if they uprooted and headed for the first world.
Government intervention into Telecom is the only way that the primary stakeholders (customers and the economy) could get the service that the country needed. There were plenty of warnings, but the head was stuck firmly in the sands of short term profits.
There are plenty of other monopolies and duopolies in NZ that understand how to play the game when you own a market. You set your prices well below monopoly prices, you are great to your customers and you know if you step out of line then the ComCom and the Government will be all over you.
Auckland Airport has not exhibited poor behaviour - they are running a good business, and are even upgrading the domestic terminal. An equivilent case for intervention would be if they put prices up, ran the terminals into the ground (and so spoiled NZ’s image and tourism numbers) and milked the dying cow.
All that is proposed for Auckland Airport is a change of ownership, which has no material impact on the relationship between the corporation and it’s stakeholders. It’s not as if the new owners are going to roll the airport up, put it on the back of a ship of unusual size and transfer it to a field outside Toronto. This intervention is uncalled for from the customers that use the airport, and to compound it has a negative effect on FDI for NZ.
Where is Infratil while this is going on? They are conflicted - on the one hand they own Wellington Airport and would love a piece of Auckland, so they should keep quiet. However on the other hand they own Preston Prestwick (edit - thanks Tylersdad) Airport South of Glasgow in Scotland, and they should be deeply protesting our Government’s ham-sized fists which will make it much harder for them to buy other foreign airports in the future.
I hear from Sydney that the iPhone is becoming a bit, well, common in the tech community.
This before a release date has even been announced in Australia.
Personally I’m a fan of only buying Apple goodies within days of launch date - to eliminate any concerns that, say, mac fanboy Rowan gets some Apple goodness before me. (Last time it was a dead heat - he’s late to the party but partying hard)
Happily, iPhone aside, the days of getting Appleware weeks ahead of compatriots by shopping in the USA are long gone.
Via the economist this chart and shows VOIP taking about 20% of all international call minutes for 2006.
Amazingly though regular international phone calls grew 10% between 2005 and 2006. I wonder how much was driven by falling prices, in turn driven by cheap and free VOIP.
Deserving of a separate post I think - those mobile browser stats show one important thing:
Nobody cares about the web on mobile phones.
The top 3 mobile browsers added up to a paltry 0.16% of web traffic, which for most Websites is approximately nothing. Of course if you are Google it’s a lot of pages, and they do have a mobile version.
Interestingly, if you look at the full stats, the iPhone has over four times the share of browsers than Windows 95.
But it all means that the whole mobile web thing is essentially irrelevant right now, though the growth is strong in the US/Europe.
However, we should recall that the iPhone and other newer phones have full web browsers, so there is no need to make pda versions of those web pages going forward.
It’s simple - just look at the stats.
After just 5 months on the US market, the iPhone browser is showing a 0.09% browser traffic share. (and that’s with 2.5G not 2G)
Compare that with Windows Mobile devices - rating 0.06% of the market, with about 14 times the number of handsets out there.
Why?
Simple. or more to the point Simplicity.
The iPhone is easy to use - you turn it on and go.
The iPhone includes free data, so you don’t have to worry about usage.
The iPhone has a larger screen, and a great browser, so browsing is actually useful.
Other phones (and my Nokia E90 is included) are hard to figure out, both for individuals and for telcos.
For example, my E90 is still, after months here, unable to connect to the Vodafone network in Australia. The problem is on the VF end, and any number of trips to the very helpful local store have made no difference.
More importantly, pre-pay phones in Oz and in NZ are not web-data connected, denying the web to over half of the market. And that half of the market is probably the most web-savvy.
Meanwhile, data charges for traditional telcos and phones are not just sky-high, they have the ability to go super-stratospheric. Start traveling and browsing overseas, and wait for the extra two or three zeros on the bill when you get home.
At least in chunks of the USA. AT&T is getting rid of them by the end of next year.
The USA had 2.6m payphones in 1998 and about 1m now.
Apparently, the story goes, AT&T (or someone else) commissioned McKinsey years ago to determine the demand for mobile phones.
The answer that came back was that the demand for mobile phones would be tiny, as folk were almost always within a few metres (ok - probably feet) or minutes of a pay phone.
I guess that study’s methodology could actually work these days - and even come up with the right answer.
It may not actually be an iPhone, but Telecom is inviting comparison between its latest handset, the Okta Touch, and the much-hyped Apple handset.
We don’t have to see the Okta to know the answer to this one.
I watched the video. TVNZ interviews David Gray (Grey?) Telecom’s Head of Consumer Marketing, which is just the title of the person you’d expect Telecom to send. Why not send the CEO, if this is so important?
David answered the first question (Why Okta?) by saying that the brand
Resonates with consumers as a name that has technological expertise and is accessible.
I’ll refrain from commenting.
He later said that the Okta Touch is aimed at business users. This is clearly not the iPhone market.
David reiterated 3 times that the Okta has Windows Mobile 6, but I’m not sure people care.
Finally he got caught trying to nuance the distinctiveness of the phone - “does this exist anywhere else? was answered by “This product does not exist with the Okta branding”. The interviewer drilled and got a more honest answer in the next question.
Nobody talked about the path beyond obsolescence when Telecom changes their high speed network next year
It’s great news. Score plus one for Paul Reynolds, who is making all the right moves as he embarks on the Telecom turnaround.
I’m running on the promised ADSL2+ here in Perth, and it is fast enough for most purposes, with an upgrade path to 20 MB per second ahead for TCNZ.
Sadly - that 20 MB is in 2011, whereas it should have been right now. But it will still put us ahead, in 2011, of where everyone except Finland, Korea and Japan are today.
(yup - I can see the bad in almost anything)
Perhaps available only in French, but it seems iPhones will have to be sold in unlocked form in France, to comply with an excellent French law.
Unlocked: tick
3G: not yet.
Still time to kill until next year then.
Finally I have broadband again. It took Perth based iiNet about a week to arm-twist Australian monopolist Telstra into connecting me. Their communications and service (24/7 help desk) has been faultless - which is stunning in this industry.
iiNet uses ADSL2, and here’s what I get:
From me at home in Perth to a local Perth server.
From me at home in Perth to San Francisco
and from me in Perth to Wellington
Meanwhile Telecom’s Broadband test shows a speed of 3300 Kbps - which is almost 50% above the maximum on their meter:
Finally - do check out the cool graphics on speedtest. It knows where you are, and lets you test your speeds from where to are to anywhere in the world.
That’s the second part of the tree on page 7 of the NZ Institute report. It shows total annual benefits of $165-$335m in increased exports from decent broadband allowing better telepresence. Telepresence I guess is defined by the authors as basically video conferencing with big screens and higher resolution.
To work it out the authors have basically said we’d get 5-10% increase in overseas sales productivity, which is applied to new sales activity 20% of the time, and as a result we wll sell and export more stuff.Now this is a really tough thing to work out, and credit to the NZ Institute for giving it a go. The validity of the answer lies, as it always does, in the numbers on the right hand side of the tree. Let’s go through them.
Current Exports: $3,200m
Continue reading ‘NZInstitute BB report: Telepresence growth benefits are limited’
If you are frustrated as hell at the ponderous pace of broadband adoption and speeds in New Zealand, then the New Zealand Institute report:
DEFINING A BROADBAND ASPIRATION:
HOW MUCH DOES BROADBAND MATTER
AND WHAT DOES NEW ZEALAND NEED?
is essential reading.
The presentation is in classic McKinsey style, which is an acquired taste, but has proven a remarkably effective method of communicating results. For more on this see The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto.
I’m going to comment on the report in a series of posts.
#1 NZInstitute BB report: Telepresence costs savings are minimal
#2 NZInstitute BB report: Telepresence growth benefits are limited
Other Sites
NZ Institute report: Defining a Broadband Aspiration
Rod Drury: The business case for Broadband
Mauricio Freitas: New Zealand Broadband needs action now
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