Cheaper calls may be at hand, but you'll probably still need two phones to get the best deals.
January has passed and life, alas, is returning to normal. The kids are back at high school. University and polytech students are dispersing to campuses around the country. And the Commerce Commission continues its long-winded deliberations aimed at bringing some sense to the New Zealand mobile phone market.
As the holiday hot spots empty out, the mobile networks will be straining under the load of texts that attempt to keep thousands of summer crushes alive. Sadly, for many, young love doesn't stand a chance.
It was always going to be tough for the girl doing surveying in Dunedin to keep the flames of romance burning with the boy studying politics in Auckland. But the weird - some would say discriminatory - way the New Zealand mobile phone market is divided up almost guarantees their hearts will be broken.
Blame it on on-net discounting. This is the practice, more prevalent here than elsewhere in the world, of mobile network operators offering deep discounts to subscribers who confine their texting and calling to other people on the same network.
Since Telecom owns the Dunedin market and Vodafone has Auckland sewn up, cellular communications between our lovelorn - and, more than likely, hard up - pair will almost certainly cease. Unless they follow the example of Tim Dibley and thousands of other Kiwis and get themselves a handset for each network.
But it's a daft way to run a telecommunications system, says Dibley, an Aucklander in the second year of an engineering degree at the University of Canterbury.
Telecom's XT network dominates in Christchurch, so he has a Telecom handset to run his university social life and a Vodafone one to stay in touch with Auckland friends and family. Lots of his Christchurch mates do the same.
"Having to have two phones is a bit stupid, really," he says. In fact, his XT plan doesn't penalise him for texting Vodafone numbers, so he gets by topping up just the Telecom phone, using the Vodafone one for incoming texts only.
2degrees, the latecomer to the mobile market, thinks it's pretty stupid too. It had been hoping the Commerce Commission, in its latest attempt to bring mobile pricing into line with the rest of the world, would have tackled the on-net discounting issue.
But it wasn't to be. The commission acknowledges that the proportion of on-net traffic here is comparatively high - and rising - but doesn't believe it warrants special attention.
But the debate isn't over yet.
Another milestone in the interminable process of deciding how much the networks can charge for handling calls from each other's subscribers - the wordy Mobile Termination Access Services Standard Terms Determination (MTAS STD is barely any better) - will be reached on Monday. That's the deadline for submissions on a draft MTAS STD released just before Christmas.
Once submissions are in, 10 days are allowed for cross-submissions; there'll then be a conference on March 1 and 2 to talk it all over and by the end of the month the whole sorry saga is supposed to be over, with whatever changes are made to the draft then set in stone.
Regardless of what the commission finally decides about on-net discounting - and, frankly, it's not showing much willingness to grasp the nettle - come April 1 there should be good news for Kiwi mobile users.
Barring major changes to the draft determination, the per-minute cost that networks will be able to charge for terminating each other's calls will be cut from 14c to 4.68c, falling to 3.91c in three years. Great, says Tuanz, the telecommunications users group (whose new head, Paul Brislen, was the spokesman for Vodafone until last year) - as long as the networks pass the cut on to subscribers. You might expect that with Brislen's knowledge of the telcos' inner workings, he could shame them into playing along if they prove reluctant.
A past commission ruling might have given 2degrees some hope that its argument about the discriminatory nature of on-net pricing would be heard.
When Telecom attempted to charge more for calls made to Vodafone landlines the commission stepped in, saying Vodafone's ability to compete in the local calling market would be affected.
But it says a similar restriction on on-net discounting wouldn't be justified under the proposed new termination rates, which "will enable a new entrant such as 2degrees to compete with the on-net prices of the incumbent networks". The one concession it offers is that it might look again at the duration of the three-year "glide path" - the period when termination rates fall gradually from 4.68c to 3.91c.
That sounds like little consolation for 2degrees, not to mention the new crop of young lovers, who're destined either for short-lived romances or carting around pockets full of phones.
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist
