Telecom has once again shafted would-be government regulators, competitors and consumers alike. This time they haven't merely changed the rules, they've brought in a whole new rule book. In a deft bit of stage magic, Telecom today revealed a ton of resources no one even knew they had.

For the last 18 months they've been beefing about Local Loop Unbundling and the government's proposed operational separation of the company into three business units. They simply didn't have the resources to unbundle more than 15 exchanges per quarter, they wailed, citing shortages of or difficulties with materials, technical staff and building consents. (The fact that unbundling gives competitors access to the those exchanges was, of course, neither here nor there.)

Yet today those resourcing constraints magically vanished. Telecom announced an aggressive plan to supplement exchanges with more than 2,000 roadside cabinets to be deployed over the next two years. The cabinets -- in a process known as "cabinetisation" -- are placed between the customer and the exchange, effectively stranding competitors with equipment inside the unbundled exchanges.

But wait. Couldn't this be good news for consumers? Well, no. For a start it's going to stop competitors unbundling exchanges. Who in their right mind will go ahead now when roadside cabinets are about to nullify that investment? On top of that, there are plenty of unanswered cabinetisation questions. Will competitors have access to them? Will there be space for their equipment? And just how is Telecom going to mange installing 2,153 cabinets -- a rate of 21 per week -- when, till yesterday, they couldn't manage to unbundle 15 exchanges per quarter? (According to this list, 20 cabinets will be in place by 1 December!)

Orcon Chief Executive Scott Bartlett told Scoop this morning, “The only reason Telecom would cabinetise so aggressively is to prevent competition and continue their monopoly on telecommunications services.  It [will] make the whole regulatory process for LLU redundant.”