Deltanine

Telephone users in New Zealand are still paying considerably more for some telephone services compared with other developed nations, according to an Economic Development Ministry report.

New Zealand is at, or close to, the bottom of the 30 developed nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on mobile phone calling prices, charges for calling a mobile from a home phone and for business high-speed Internet connections. It is either 28th, 29th or 30th on price in these services.

Follow up:

The report comes on the eve of the Commerce Commission's revised recommendation to Communications Minister David Cunliffe on whether wholesale mobile prices should be regulated. Mobile phone charges for medium and high users would have to drop by about 50 per cent for New Zealand to move into the top half of developed nations.

"For cellular usage greater than about 30 call minutes per week, New Zealand's relative performance ranking is among the poorest in the OECD," the report said.

The cost of high-speed internet business connections of 512 kilobits a second would have to drop 75% for New Zealand to be in the top half of the OECD.

New Zealand's ranking is higher for residential and business fixed line prices – 22nd and 23rd – using the OECD standard benchmark. The data used was for February this year. New Zealand moves up to 18th using August data.

Taking into account New Zealand's free local calls and free dial-up Internet services, New Zealand scored highly at No 5 of 30 nations for fixed line services.

But broadband uptake was still low. New Zealand's 10.9 per cent of households with broadband was under half the OECD average of 21.2 per cent, even though 95% of dwelling can get it. New Zealand's overall ranking of 22 out of 30 did not change.

New Zealand's upstream broadband speeds were low compared with other developed nations, so low in fact that 128kb/s (pretty much the only feasible option) is not considered broadband under most definitions.

"Although there are some limited services on which New Zealand compares favourably with other OECD countries, in general there is a significant gap between New Zealand pricing performance and that of countries in the top half of the OECD," the ministry said.

Advanced broadband telecommunications were being rolled out in a number of developed nations. In New Zealand, Telecom was trying out advanced services and had indicated it would provide advanced broadband to some households by 2007.

The report said a factor to be taken into account was that there was no infrastructure owner and supplier of telecommunications networks other than Telecom. TelstraClear's cable network in Wellington, Kapiti and Christchurch provided an alternative to a limited number of households.