Posts Tagged ‘Telecommunications’

A sigh of relief ... for now

Almost every New Zealander who used a mobile network oversea agrees that the telco services and charges here are absolutely a disgrace. The competition between Vodafone and Telecom New Zealand never happened, they got about 50% market share each and are pretty happy to stay that way, enjoying a nice duopoly.

That's why a third player is needed.

I just browsed through 2 degrees mobile's pricing plan,  it's clear that they are targeting  low volume users just like me for now, and the pricing is very impressive in most areas, although there is still a gap to catch up with the rest of the world, but hey, somebody has to make a start.

The only downside is the expensive data charge, 50cents/mb. However, I would expect a data plan to come out pretty soon. Before that I'll keep two numbers.

I ordered the  promotional free SIM with $5, and can't wait to have it now.

BTW, The Herald has compiled an excellent table showing duopoly at work(PDF).

More on section 92A of the Copyright Act

As you noticed, the original Act lacks details on how ISP should react in relation to copyright holder complains. Telecommunications Carriers' Forum recently published a draft Code of practice and is open for public submission.

I kind of like this code. In summary:

• Four strikes out, final warning after three strikes;
• No matter how many times you infringed copyright, only one time is counted for a month;
• The strike expires 18 months after it was first issued;
• ISP serves you a "education notice" (one strike) when copyright holders made a complain.
• If you dispute,  the notice is revoked, and the copyright holder won't get your personal details ( you don't have the right to dispute after three strikes).
• If you don't dispute, that counts as one strike.
• Four strikes, and you are out.

If this is the way the ISPs will act after section 92A comes in force, then I'm pretty happy.This code of practice reminds me of another important Internet copyright Act - DMCA. They are pretty similar as the duty of identifying whether someone infringed copyright ultimately falls to the justice system, and ISP, as a neutral party, only act upon notices.

If you dispute the "education notice", the only way left for copyright holders is to sue you in court, which is quite unlikely in my opinion, unless you've downloaded too many stuffs justifying their cost and benefit analysis.

TCF definitly made a good call.

About ... Ihug

Ihug is one of most recognisable telecommunication brands in New Zealand, possibly just right after Telecom New Zealand.

About it's service... it is declining, but still good. Its email service went nuts for quite a few times in the past years, but it didn't had any impact on me ... I never use ISP email boxes.

However, we may need to say goodbye to ihug soon. Its owner, Vodafone New Zealand, will shut down the brand and merge the current service to becone part of Vodafone New Zealand around April this year.

I guess this is possibly a good news to current customers like me, except...

I was very happy with ihug's old brandband plan I'm on (2mb plan which gives 4 gb allowance, 2gb for peak time and other 2gb for non-peak time).

I don't need a fast speed so I was reluctant to move to the new 7.5mb plan for quite a long time. And another reason I liked the plan, well, you can see it below:

You can sort of guess out how I did it by just look at this picture, and I can swear to you that except normal log in process, there's absolutely no illegal tools/hackings involved.

But I recently received a pretty and polite (but not nice) letter from ihug - they will switch my broadband to a new plan from March(of course, by force) from March, which I don't want to have.

Without the 'extra' data allowance which Ihug kindly provided to me for the last year or two, Ihug's service is not as competitive as other ISPs like Orcon and TelstraClear.

I'm seriously considering switiching to another ISP, after being a 4 year loyal Ihug customer.