KEY POINTS:
You have to admire the simplicity of Vodafone's latest offering, designed to take a chunk out of Telecom's phone line access market.
Vodafone At Home consists of a slim little box that holds a SIM card and is plugged into your regular home phone via one cable and
mains power via the other. When you pick up the phone you hear a dial tone as normal, but the connection is delivered via Vodafone's mobile network rather than the phone line coming into your house, which will cost you anywhere up to $45 a month just to keep live.
You get to keep your regular phone number, put the box anywhere in the house that suits you and run numerous cordless handsets off it.
Best of all is the pricing - $40 a month for unlimited national and local calls. It makes At Home one of the most competitive calling deals around.
I found the quality pretty good - no different to using a GSM phone. I did get a bit of interference on the line - that buzzing you get when you're too close to an electronic device. But generally it was tolerable.
At Home would be perfect for a nomadic teleworker like myself, were it not for the fact that it doesn't support internet access. That makes snipping the line to Telecom impossible for me - I need broadband on tap to supply my wireless router and the computers in my house.
Vodafone would suggest I buy one of their Vodem mobile broadband devices and receive internet access wirelessly as well. But the pricing for mobile data - $40 a month for 1GB ($50 for 2GB) just doesn't compare to fixed-line broadband plans.
What I'm puzzled at however is why Vodafone hasn't gotten serious at attacking Telecom and released the service its German customers were able to first take advantage of in 2005 - Zuhause Talk & Web.
This consists of the same type of fixed-line replacement for voice calls, but comes with a box that also functions as a wireless router feeding broadband to your computers, printers and acting as a fax machine. It's based on Vodafone's 3G network so there's enough capacity to deliver good-quality voice calling and high-speed internet access. At $40 for national calling and, say, $40 for a 5GB mobile broadband cap, I'd be first in line to sign up.
So why didn't Vodafone go with a technology that's already tried and tested in Germany? It seems that the power of the fixed-line connection is still formidable, even if the quality difference between DSL and mobile broadband is shrinking.
A survey carried out by the company in Germany last year found that, of excuses for not taking up the service given by potential customers, 37 per cent said they needed to have a fixed-line internet connection.
Vodafone's move into the fixed-line DSL market in Germany and its purchase of internet provider iHug here, were admissions that it simply couldn't deliver the entire package customers are looking for solely via its mobile network.
Still, I think there's scope for an all-mobile service that would appeal to everything from small businesses to students. Then there are all those frustrated rural telecoms users.
Talk & Web would be well-suited to delivering calling and broadband to people in rural areas and there's actually a pressing need for it. Telecom is currently required, under the Telecommunications Service Obligation, to offer free local calling and basic dial-up level internet access to all copper phone lines in the country. But that's not economical to do on a nationwide basis, so to reach "non-viable" customers, Telecom's competitors have to dip into their pockets to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year to subsidise Telecom's costs.
Vodafone is dark on this as it pays the lion's share of the subsidy and has pointed out that the number of non-viable customers - currently somewhere over 50,000, is falling, but the cost of the TSO is rising each year.
There seems to be a simple solution to this shabby situation which is effectively discouraging companies from serving customers in what are considered to be economically-marginal areas. With a Talk & Web box, rural customers with good Vodafone coverage could get home phone calling and broadband internet access via the mobile network, with Wi-Fi networking feeding numerous computers in the home.
Vodafone says its network covers 70 per cent of the non-viable customers and claims it would be happy to step in and deliver a service to those customers instead of writing a cheque out to Telecom each year.
That sort of arrangement, and the Commerce Commission is currently considering it, could go a couple of ways. Uneconomical regions could be carved up and made contestable - a Telecom competitor effectively takes on a contract to offer basic phone and internet services and therefore avoids having to pay Telecom the share of the TSO those customers represent.
Another option is to give competitors who move into a non-viable region an exemption from the TSO, one which can be dropped if the company ever decides to pull out of the region. Both options allow Telecom's competitors to actually build a customer base, however marginal the financial rewards, rather than simply inflating Telecom's bank balance. The rest of us could take advantage of it too - if the price was right.
