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Take out that LLU component however, and you'll see that there's not a lot for NZ's technology companies or entrepreneurs.

We all knew there'd be no personal tax cuts but the lack of incentive for businesses to invest in R&D is a real disappointment.

As if to really ram home the point that this country is becoming a far less attractive place for hi-tech investment is the news that Microsoft is sinking over NZ$1 million into a venture in Brisbane.

So Mr Cullen, why didn't that money come NZ's way?

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Could it be that our university researchers aren't as good as those in Australia?

Of course that's not the reason -- we all heard your patriotic words on TV1's Closeup programme last night so we know you must have confidence in our Kiwi egg-heads.

But that leaves only one viable reason for Microsoft's choice of country in which to invest its research dollars -- the financial climate -- right?

So despite what the Finance Minister might say about NZ being a great place to invest, why is it that very savvy companies like Microsoft choose Australia?

Could Cullen have lost the plot?

But enough about the budget -- we all knew (given that this isn't an election year) it would be little but a sop (LLU excepted).

Let's talk about the windfall you're probably going to be receiving soon.

Will you he spending it on a trip to Fiji for a holiday in the sun? Perhaps a new Porsche? How about an in-ground pool for the summer?

"What windfall?" you're asking.

"Why, the $3 or so that Xtra will be giving you for the small inconvenience of not having reliable broadband for much of the week" I reply.

What the hell is going on over at Telecom's Xtra anyway?

How on earth can a company with all those resources possibly end up with such a series of catastrophes in such a short time?

Step back a few weeks and imagine you're the ISP division of the nation's monopoly DSL provider...

Why would you worry too much about properly implementing fallback hardware and procedural systems? After all -- if your system goes tits-up, where will your customers go anyway?

Sure, they could jump from Xtra to another ISP, but even then you'd still be making almost the same amount of money because you're providing the wholesale-level service to that competing ISP, with only a tiny margin involved for them.

So you see, without LLU, there's really been no need for Telecom to invest in the kind of additional equipment required to create a truly robust system.

But will LLU solve this problem?

Maybe yes, maybe no.

Telecom may decide to go for the hi-end business by implementing just such a robust backup and hiking its service-level guarantees (or actually providing *any* form of guarantee).

This is good, because the odds are that the other smaller operators coming into the market won't be able to afford such luxuries. I suspect that their systems will only have very limited redundancy or resilience to failures - mainly because they'll be trying hard to compete on price and it's hard to maintain your margins at that end of the market.

The *big* advantage is that, as consumers, those of us who really need to have maximum reliability should be able to afford a secondary DSL account to provide our own backup. Of course the odds are that this will also require a second set of copper -- it's no good hooking two DSLAMs up to one piece of copper.

In the meantime -- Xtra, you deserve to pay customers a snot-load more than the miserable token you're offering however, like Cullen, you seem far too mean spirited to really appreciate the negative impact of your myopia.

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