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Letter: NZ telco got it wrong on purpose
by Staff Writer | posted on 02 October 2006
Reader Mike Henderson from New Zealand, takes issue with the assessment (NewsWireless, 29 Sept) of his local mobile telco: "Telecom New Zealand is hardly a 'wannabe telco' who doesn't have a 3G licence." He explains:
They are NZ's incumbent formerly state-owned telco, who have in this case made the totally wrong decision a few years ago to go with CDMA instead of GSM.
They did this at least partly to ensure that it would be hard for customers to churn between networks, as they have to buy new handsets to switch to the opposition, which is VodaFone NZ and of course GSM.
Telecom NZ have a reasonable EVDO (I think) 3G service, but are losing out in the business mobile market big-time because customers want to roam internationally, and CDMA seems to be a niche product in many markets.
The death-knell was Telstra (Oz telco, still majority state-owned) announcing that they were going to drop their CDMA network from the end of 2008, and be an all-GSM supplier. If you can't even roam to Sydney, what use would a Telecom NZ Mobile be?
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