Response to comments

I've been getting some interest from readers of lte and rather than responding below their comments I thought I might write a free for all response.

Ian has commented on and NBN post and raised the vexed question of battery backup for the ONT. I think it is time we reframed the whole question of emergency power. How many households have battery powered televisions and radios either? I've written before about the logic of a single DC power rail for saving on transformer losses, but it is also something we should develop to provide a survivability of power across the information and communication devices i the house.

Susan has provided a thoughtful comment on Bradfield and noted that the CDP had the benefit of the donkey vote. She is also right that the Sex Party will struggle to match the by-election result at a Senate election.

Telstra skeptic has suggested that overhauling Telstra's customer service program program will be a big ask. It will actually be bigger than we first thought given that they can't even be truthful in the face they used to promote it, Megan Lane having been outed as a former Telstra PR flack. It was no much this deception as the fact that Lane works in one of those industries flagged in the front screen as over-represented.

I was also disappointed that a response I had from Telstra only focussed on my inability to enrol as an advisor - which missed my point that their enrollment process just left me with an incentive to lie, and that it would have been better to let me enrol but ignore my results. They also don't seem to get that there are some pretty obvious things to fix in customer service - as a friend pointed out today even taxis ring on approach.

Ian challenged my description of John Howard as a great leader. I meant that only within the context of the Liberal part's own assessment, not a universal view. And I appreciate the correction re Hockey's schooling - should have been able to tell he was only CAS not GPS.

Finally Jim Holmes asks what strategy I think a telco like AAPT should be pursuing. The first thing I'd suggest isto pay more attention to their incredibly talented and hard working corporate comms team and work on their key messages and media presence. The second is to invest more in value-adding elements and less on replicable network elements. It remains a disgrace that no one reselling fixed and mobile voice offers seemless integrated voicemail platforms. To achieve this you need to negotiate both the price for access to match eiother free retrieval or deposit or both that occurs in network integrated services, and you need access to the message waitb flags in the switches.

The great pity is that AAPT and Telecom NZ have never worked out how to leverage the capabilities that Telecom has into the telco where they don't own the access infrastructure. I always believed that Telecom NZ had the most to gain friom "unilateral disarmament" and undergoing voluntary separation as I wrote about in the TJA.