By RICHARD WOOD
Telecom is refusing to comment on an industry news report that only 13,000 residential customers have taken its Jetstream broadband service since its introduction in 1999.
Spokeswoman Kerry Lamont said Telecom had 44,000 residential Jetstream users.
But she would not say how many of those were using Jetstream Starter,
which operates at 128 kilobits a second and is not considered a broadband service.
Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Ernie Newman said that if the report on the idg.net.nz web site was true, it was an appalling revelation.
"In the absence of a denial one has to assume there is some truth in it," he said.
Newman said New Zealand had probably been over-reporting its broadband use, and its position in the OECD might be even worse than the 21st out of 28 at which it was last ranked.
Telecom Xtra marketing director Chris Thompson said all Jetstream connections were digital subscriber line broadband, and it was all a question of "nuances and words".
The Jetstream DSL connections run between 2Mbps and 8 megabits a second between the home and the exchange, but the speed of the service came from the plan chosen by the customer.
Newman said Telecom had promised 100,000 broadband connections by the end of next year, and that could only be taken to mean high speed with 256Kbps at the bottom end.
"The debates that fudge the definition of broadband and try to tell us we're doing okay by world standards when we are patently not give us a sense of complacency," he said.
Thompson said not all users wanted high speed, although they might want the "always connected" aspect of Jetstream.
He said a big growth area in the United States was DSL lines that ran at dial-up internet speeds for a lower cost. Dial-up is typically a maximum of 56Kbps.
"For lots of customers who use email and web it's a question of price benefit."
Thompson said the consumer market was a "tough nut to crack" as residential customers had an incentive to remain on dial-up because call charges were untimed.
Telecom last week announced a new 256Kbps service for $50 a month which it is hoping will convert many Jetstream Starter customers.
But the service has a monthly 500MB usage cap - as opposed to a 5GB cap for Jetstream Starter.
