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One of the first to do so was Orcon, who announced that anyone signing up to their planned static-IP, uncapped flat-rate 256Kbps service before the churn fee came into affect would get this service for $20 less than the price Telecom charges for its JetSurf.

Ihug also hinted that they too would be offering aggressive new packages designed to compete head-on with Telecom's offerings.

This was obviously great news for consumers -- especially power users and those who find they really need a static IP number so they can set up their own mailserver or whatever.

It was with great sadness (but little surprise) therefore that I read this release on the Orcon website.

It would seem that, in the wake of Orcon's announcement and the buzz created by other ISPs getting ready to thoroughly thrash Telecom's JetSurf offering in terms of price and performance, the encumbent has decided to introduce new terms and conditions to cripple its competition.

Now I can possibly understand how, in order to protect the performance of its network, Telecom might just be able to justify demanding a 10GB cap. After all, they have to provide sufficient backbone capacity to support the bandwidth requirements of all customers and a growth in the number of "power users" could become expensive to support when charging a fixed monthly fee for the UBS service.

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The static IP thing however is something completely different.

If, as Orcon's press release suggests, Telecom has decided to prohibit the advertising of static IP addresses under the UBS package then they are clearly doing this solely to protect other aspects of their data comms activities.

Obviously Telecom/Xtra don't want people running servers on their own JetSurf product so they don't allow static IPs. If other ISPs *did* provide static IPs and thus allowed mail or webservers to be run, it's easy to see how this could impact the competitiveness of the encumbent's offerings.

So, it would seem that Telecom's UBS package is now designed to allow full and free competition in the DSL marketplace -- but only as long as you're not trying to a better product than JetSurf.

This becomes even more apparent when you realise that Telecom is also axing the JetStream Starter packages which *did* allow ISPs to set their own data caps.

It would appear that rather than representing a yielding of control, the UBS service actually strengthens Telecom's grip on the DSL market and what shape our DSL packages will take.

Now, if you're a competing ISP, you can buy wholesale access to DSL and create your own offering -- but the T&C associated with the wholesale provision seems to ensure that you're not really going to be able to offer a better service than JetSurf.

Hands up everyone who thinks this is outrageous.

This kind of makes fools of those government ministers who, despite the opinions of the industry and even their own ITC minister, chose to protect Telecom's monopoly on the local loop.

As we all figured, they've condemned us to a lack of true competition and little chance that anyone will be able to offer exciting, innovative and competitive new DSL products.

And speaking of dim-witted politicians, I see that in the wake of National Leader Don Brash's reshuffle of his shadow cabinet, Maurice Williamson hangs on to the title of shadow minister for IT.

Once again we have a bunch of politicians who simply aren't listening to the industry.

Why do I get the feeling that, despite their fancy words, none of the major parties really care a bean about improving NZ's performance in the global knowledge-based economy -- at least not in the ITC arena.

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