Chris Barton: How to win the hearts of geeks

Direct Broking's May newsletter has some interesting investorspeak about Telecom. "Telecom operates as a monopoly, duopoly or dominant player, depending on the revenue stream providing ongoing earnings reliability." Translation: Telecom is creaming it.

"Capital expenditure is high but so are the margins and long-term rewards resulting from a dominant market share, with penetration rates overseas for these products far higher versus New Zealand suggesting growth is available." Translation: When you're a monopoly, you control market growth, so you can keep creaming it ad infinitum.

"Added to the armoury is a superb management team who successfully block, stall or mitigate every regulatory threat." Translation: Government attempts to stop Telecom creaming it are a joke.

Direct Broking makes these points to show why buying Telecom stock is a sure thing - safer than houses. But the investment advice is also a sad indictment on government telecommunications policy. Despite the Telecommunications Act implemented in 2001, consumers are no better off. Telecom is still calling the shots and New Zealand has some of the most expensive telecommunication services in the developed world. In broadband internet, our services are so poor that we look like a third-world casualty.

So with an election looming, it's time for our political parties to get serious about wooing the geek voter. Here are some policy planks politicians might like to think about.

Telecom's monopoly gone by lunchtime. Easy to promise but hard to deliver, this policy requires backbone. It's rather unpalatable starting point is that when it comes to telecommunications, letting the market decide is a crock. To level the playing field for open competition requires some hard-nosed intervention. Forget about local loop unbundling, this no-nonsense policy is about price control and the break up of Telecom into a lines company and a services company - something that should have happened when the Government sold this prized asset for a song in 1989.

The policy has two sub-planks: "Number portability in by lunchtime" - an immediate new law mandating that consumers can keep both their home number and mobile phone number for life, taking it with them whenever they change providers. The second plank is "Douglas Webb outski": the appointment of a telecommunications watchdog with teeth, not one who does backflips on crucial decisions and speaks cowboy talk - "we're going to ride close-herd on this" - but doesn't walk the walk.

Building the information super-duper highway. Yes, this does sound like a throwback to the phrase popularised by Al Gore in the early 1990s. The difference this time is the duper. We're talking about a next-generation network delivering gigabit - not megabit - per second speeds: a government-owned network linking all our tertiary and research institutions, but open to anyone else who wants to jump on for the ride. It's necessary because Telecom is showing no signs of building for a gigabit future and it's vital if New Zealand wants to remain in the information age. The policy, also known as "the people's network", breathes new life into BCL, the former transmission arm of TVNZ that is charged with making the magic happen. Politicians embracing the policy also get to say "if you build it they will come".

Think big with bandwidth. A policy that unashamedly harks back to the Muldoonist era. The logic is simple. The world is big. New Zealand is small. We can be part of the big world if we're connected by big pipes. Also, what's the point of having a super-duper information highway if it's throttled back to a trickle when it crosses the oceans? The policy has the government making multi-billion dollar investments in bandwidth - on the Southern Cross and other undersea cables and on satellite transponders in the skies - for the people's network. Politicians embracing the policy get to stand beside Peter Jackson as his latest movie flashes to the four corners of the globe faster than a speeding bullet and say "we have banished the tyranny of distance."

But the really sad indictment of our politicians is that none of them have any idea of a decent telecommunications policy. And regardless of who wins the election, Telecom will still be in power - free to cream monopoly profits from consumers with little choice.