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Not only has the Commerce Commission continue to berate the company for its monopolistic tendencies and uncompetitive (compared to other OECD nations) pricing but other industry groups have also come down on it like a tonne of bricks.

When you look at how almost everyone is ganging up on the poor encumbent telco, it's almost possible to start feeling sorry for Theresa and her gang -- but only for a moment.

Once you realise that Telecom has brought this entirely on their own head, any hint of sympathy ought to get the bum's-rush and things can be viewed in a more objective light.

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The crazy thing is that, even now, the company continues to try and play with words and fudge the facts.

Yesterday it announced that it had exceeded the target of delivering 30% of new growth through wholesaling its products. Now that's really great -- except that wasn't actually the target at all. It's pretty easy to hit any target if can claim that whatever you happen to hit was always what you were aiming for isn't it?

Now it's come out shooting and, because it doesn't much like the findings and rulings of the Commerce Commission, it's claiming that they're unlawful.

But wait... there's more!

Once again Telecom is threatening to stop investing the provision of services to rural NZers if it can't be allowed to get at least some leverage from its monopolies.

Come on Telecom, if you hadn't been so greedy in the first place and tried to keep competition at bay by unfairly leveraging your ownership of the local loop (and therefore the DSL market), you wouldn't be in the hard place you now find yourself.

What's more, if you keep dragging the chain, bitching, moaning and whining as you are, then you may well find that you wake up to your worst nightmare: the forced unbundling of the local loop!

It's time for Theresa and her gang to sit down, take a deep breath, and face the fact that they're going to have to learn to live with competition, whether they like it or not.

It's going to be much easier to manage such competition if you take the initiative and organise things under your own set of rules -- rather than constantly wait for the CC to force your hand.

And while *I'm* bitching, I'd like to hear from DSL users as to just what throughputs they're getting in the evenings. My own connection drops to as little as 30Kbps (that's 3Kbytes/second -- worse than dialup) once everyone decides to do a little evening surfing. Even sites like Google slow to a crawl under the load.

Should Telecom's DSL be called "part-time broadband" perhaps?

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