Editorial
Oh Theresa, Stop Your Whining!
Poor old hard-done-by Theresa Gattung and her little Telco Telecom.

You should have heard the whining coming from the corporate quarters yesterday in response to the launch of Clear's ZFree Free ISP service.

"Freeloaders" she called them.

Ms Gattung -- Get a real haircut and get a life!

Your corporate nasties were probably smug as hell when they bullied everyone else into submitting to your unbalanced interconnect deal (you only pay $0.02 to other telcos but demand they pay you $0.03).

I bet there was champagne and caviar with lots of guffawing and jibing on the evening you stuck that one to them right?

Now that you've been hoist by your own petard then at least have the grace to shut up and take it on the chin like a, er, um... modern, self-confident, upwardly mobile professional CEO.

If you really think that residential phone users of New Zealand, or the ISPs who have been forced at the point of a loaded gun to subscribe to your 0867 service are going to have any sympathy for the fact that you won't make quite as much out of interconnects this year as you'd hoped to -- then I have to ask "what colour is the sky in your world?"

I find the attacks from both Glen Sowry and Theresa Gattung to be incredibly disingenuous and unprofessional. One almost gets the feelings that, having had their previously invulnerable defenses (ie: the team of rotweiler lawyers) effectively dealt a stunning blow, Telecom's executive team is now running scared and grasping at straws.

As in the Wizard of Oz where there was fear that the invulnerability of the image was about to be challenged I'd say: "pay no attention to that [wo]man behind the curtain."

Now if Telecom want the benefit of my wonderful insight and intellect (yes, I am joking), why don't they simply roll out their ADSL service at a more realistic pace and a sensible price to a wider audience?

Instead of litigating and whining -- why not innovate and compete?

Or are those words missing from the monopolist's dictionary?

And by the way -- just check out what your tech, security and abuse people are up to over at XTRA -- it may not make you too happy -- it's certainly not making you flavour of the month with a number of other rather large carriers and ISPs around the world. More to come on this story later!

Well there you go -- see, I can whine every bit as well as Ms Gattung and Mr Sowry -- and I do it for a lot less money!

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