Today's Herald carries a story about the Commerce Commission rejecting Telecom's argument that power has to be reduced on short copper loops in order to provide DSL service on longer ones.

The Commission's decision follows a report from consultant Paul Brooks, which in essence rubbished all of Telecom's proposed spectrum management claims.

In fact, the report says the term "spectrum management" is a misnomer, and that we should be talking about "interference management" instead. Any reputable carrier should put in place an interference management plan as it rolls out DSL, the report says.

However, despite starting the DSL deployment in 1999 already, Telecom has yet to do so. That's right, Telecom's been running the DSL network by taking some pretty severe shortcuts for the past seven years. Even so, it's worked more or less fine now, the report says, so why the hurry to deploy a managment plan now?

Was Telecom trying to prevent an accelerated DSL deployment on the back of further wholesale providers? It's not entirely clear what the incumbent's reasons were for launching the delay strategy, assisted by obfuscated technological arguments that its network manager Alcatel augmented in a report to Telecom, and which was released to media as well. That report backfired on Telecom though, as it was widely seen as an indictment by the network manager on how poorly the incumbent maintained its copper.

Clearly what Theresa Gattung said when the new regulation was announced is... complete rubbish. The above shows that there's no change at Telecom. It's still trying to obfuscate and delay at any given turn, and if you don't believe me, look at Telecom's submission to the Select Committee deliberating on the proposed new regulation currently. Telecom's trying to wangle out of any clause in the new regulation that would matter, and proposes instead a regime that would be different to today's only on paper - in effect, Telecom would carry on regulating itself. I hope the Select Committee is able to see through Telecom's "legalistic argument" (which incidentally Theresa promised not to hide behind).

The ComCom's spectrum management report and decision is hard to find on its Byzantine website, but here's a direct link to it. The report by Brooks is a good read, as it demolishes Telecom's arguments one by one. I'm curious as to why Telecom is allowed to present obviously fallacious arguments like that to a government agency actually.