From April, New Zealand will gain a modicum of number portability. So, for example, someone who chooses to switch to making all their local calls over Vodafone's Zuhause widget could keep their old Telecom phone number.

Will revolution follow? Not necessarily. The Economist (Jan 20) reports that in Japan number portability was introduced in October. But since then, only a modest 1 million of 100 million subscribers have jumped providers. The reason: it's not just about your phone number. If you can't take your email address with you too (and, here, a vast majority of the nation does of course have an email address with Telecom's Xtra) then it's not worth the hassle.

Sure you can buy a personalised domain name (eg chriskeall.com) that you can use to host an email address you can keep across ISPs, but that costs money, and the likes of Google's Gmail aren't recommended for business.

Meanwhile, in another broadband shocker, it turns out the ugly mish mash of McMansions along Auckland's posh Paratai Drive can't get broadband. Or so complains Jenny Gibbs in today's Herald.

The headline 'She's a millionaire and she still can't get broadband' is completely wrong-headed. The Herald should check out PC World's school zone rule: the better your school zone, the posher the neighbourhood and the more people who can afford broadband - so the worse your local exchange becomes overloaded.

As Jenny is just starting to comprehend, Telecom's 'Xtraordinaries' campaign an enthusiastic response to political pressure. It works (for Telecom), both ways: it encourages many more New Zealanders onto broadband, a goal the government has on Telecom to achieve. And, as Telecom techies have always maintained, turning off network management for 'unconstrained' full-tilt downloads was always going to mean a whole bunch of people actually got a worse broadband experience over our creaky, pre-DSL2 network - so Telecom can say to David Cunliffe: 'Nyah, nyah, told you the system couldn't stand it'.