KEY POINTS:
Another year, another Government and the bothersome broadband baton is passed to another Communications and Information Technology Minister - Steven Joyce, former radio station entrepreneur and National Party campaign manager of Hollow Men fame.
But where others have failed so miserably in this portfolio, Joyce has good odds to succeed. He comes to his office with a promise to deliver backed by a fat cheque. Joyce is the minister who can spend up large, the $1.5 billion fibre-optic man.
So far, however, there's been little detail on how he intends to dole out this mega-sum to bring "ultra-fast broadband" to 75 per cent of New Zealanders - just how he intends to fix our creaking telecommunications infrastructure of cobbled-together copper delivering internet at a trickle.
We do know fibre-optic cable is at the centre of Joyce's rewiring plan and the mechanism to get there is the much-vaunted public-private partnership.
So far so good. But just who does Joyce plan to partner with? And will he be seduced by Telecom's wiles?
There's no doubt Telecom would love to bed Joyce. Such a tryst - Telecom building, operating and no doubt, wanting to own, the new wires - would secure the firm's monopoly dynasty forever.
But it's also clear such a dalliance would be a terrible mistake. Not to mention a betrayal of voter trust and a very poor return on taxpayers' money.
If Joyce is still uncertain about what to do, he should re-read the very fine piece of analysis prepared for Internet New Zealand by Network Strategies. There, in glorious return on investment detail, is a simple answer to who the Government should partner with instead of Telecom - electricity lines companies.
Why? Because if New Zealand wants to rewire its aged telecommunications to a fibre-optic future, the electricity lines companies are the cheapest, most efficient way to do it.
Plenty of power poles and ducting are already going by our homes, already with resource consent, making it much easier to string or trench fibre to our doorsteps. How much cheaper? Without the lines companies, Network Strategies estimates a fibre network will cost $5 billion.
With the lines companies on board, the cost drops to $3 billion - making the Government's $1.5 billion investment look like a very realistic sum to fulfil its election promise.
There are other reasons why this is very good idea. Most of the 27 lines companies in New Zealand are owned by consumer trusts - an ownership structure that tends to be sympathetic to longer payback periods and fits well with local initiatives that recognise the importance of broadband to a region's economic and social wellbeing. And some, such as Vector and Counties Power, are already providing fibre to homes or businesses.
But there are two problems. The first is what such a network would do to Telecom's share price. There's no doubt it would have an unsettling effect. But if the new wires are "open access", it's hard to see how Telecom can complain too much.
Open access means companies get equal access to the infrastructure on non-discriminatory terms and conditions, so all comers are offered the same wholesale products or services at the same price and equivalent conditions. In other words, consumers get choice and Telecom competes for business with everyone else, probably getting a whole lot more efficient in the process.
But more worrying is that Joyce's first moves as minister indicate he may be blind to the "utility expansion" model of building a fibre network and may already be succumbing to Telecom's attractions.
Last week, clearing the decks for his plan, Joyce biffed the BIF, Labour's $340 million Broadband Investment Fund. Fair enough; National's the boss now. Except he's thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The BIF was too piecemeal in its approach, but many of the applications for money were from electricity lines companies and local councils wanting to service impoverished broadband areas in exactly the public-private partnership suggested in the Network Strategies report.
It's a worry that Joyce seems so ready to ignore the hard work of many on the ground who understand this problem better than he does.
But it's early days and what kind of minister he becomes is yet to play out. He doesn't seem to be driven by dogma like Richard "Mad Dog" Prebble, who wrote a book called I've Been Thinking, but who will be remembered as the minister who didn't think and sold us down the drain.
Let's hope he's not like Maurice Williamson - the champion of "light-handed" regulation and remembered as the minister who loved monopoly. Joyce is also clearly more decisive than the well-meaning but ineffectual Paul Swain, who promised so much, delivered so little and didn't unbundle. The minister who couldn't.
Then there was David Cunliffe, the minister who could and who although he didn't quite slay the giant as his namesake did, did get the regulations working well enough to at least hogtie its anti-competitive tendencies.
Joyce now has everything in his favour. Will he be the minister who rewired the country bringing ultrafast, affordable broadband for all? Or the minister who blew it?
