Broadband cheaper but ‘shambles’ in Oz
Plans to work from home put spotlight on cost, says expert
The good news: New Zealanders are paying less for mobile phone service and home broadband than the OECD average on many plans, according to the Commerce Commission’s Annual Telecommunications Monitoring Report, released yesterday.
The bad: We still pay quite a lot more than Australians for most types of mobile and broadband. And even against the OECD, there’s a glaring exception in the medium user category. The mitigating: Pundits say the grass isn’t greener across the ditch, because Aussie broadband quality has fallen behind NZ’s.
“Australia’s broadband is a shambles and nobody should be paying for what they laughingly describe as ‘service’,” technology commentator Paul Brislen says.
“Compared with New Zealand’s UFB [Ultrafast broadband fibre rollout], the Australian experience is slower, more disjointed, more disruptive and more likely to fail,” he adds.
“As we look at sending a large percentage of the workforce home to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s a huge relief to know many of us can use a fibre service . . . on par with the service offered in central city offices and at a reasonable price-point.”
Telecommunications Users Association (Tuanz) head Craig Young takes a similar line on quality, saying, “By any measure, fixedbroadband in NZ for the majority is better than in Australia — particularly if you’re in a fibre area.”
Young expects the rise of “fixedwireless” broadband — where
Vodafone and Spark use their respective mobile networks to deliver broadband to a home or workplace as a landline-substitute to help close the price gap.
Both carriers have recently been pushing this new technology hard, driven by the financial incentive of eliminating Chorus and its clip of roughly half the ticket on a landline.
And the Tuanz boss also noted that New Zealand is cheaper than
Australia for the fastest broadband plans, or those over 100 megabits per second — fast by Aussie standards, if far slower than the 1000Mbit/s plans now popular here, and the 4000Mbit/ s fibre just coming on to the market.
Ecosystem principal consultant Peter Wise says it’s just maths: long term we’ll always have higher mobile and broadband pricing than many countries with larger, more tightlypacked populations that are cheaper to service. But the public-private UFB rollout means more of us are using ultrafast broadband, per capita, than most countries.
“New Zealand is still punching well above its weight in fibre penetration compared to Australia, USA, UK and most OECD countries,” Wise says.
The survey also confirmed that UFB fibre is now New Zealand’s most popular type of internet connection, ahead of copper lines — which Chorus will be able to start ripping out or at least switching off from January 22 under an update to the Telecommunications Act (which in turn will cause grief for those still using landlines for emergency calls).
By the end of the ComCom’s survey period (September 30, 2019), there were 880,000 households and businesses on UFB fibre (of 1.6 million within reach) — a 31 per cent increase over the same time last year.
Growth in fixed-wireless slowed to “only” 14 per cent from the 36 per cent increase seen in 2018. At its recent half-year result, Spark said it deliberately took its foot off the accelerator as it prioritised its fibre retail business in the run-up to the Rugby World Cup.
However, both Spark and Vodafone are looking to their respective 5G upgrades to give fixedwireless update a boost.
The ComCom also found people continuing to give up landlines which, in one commentator’s words, are often only used these days to field calls from parents or salespeople.
More than 46 per cent of households are now mobile-only.
Both fixed and mobile data usage continues to surge, although the ComCom notes that fixed had eased off and that mobile data use was still modest next to landlines.