Jama: Telecom has done more to improve broadband than the government has done to improve roading, the security of electricity supply or hospital waiting lists.

$4.5b was a lot of money on 1990 which is when LABOUR sold off Telecom. Again - sing along....

'Labour sold Telecom and now they want it back...'

LLU is generally opposed by the ILECs, which in most cases used to be state monopoly enterprises before the telecommunications sector was liberalised. They argue that LLU amounts to a regulatory taking, that they are forced to provide competitors with essential business inputs, that LLU stifles infrastructure-based competition and technical innovation because new entrants prefer to 'parasitise' the incumbent's network instead of building their own and that the regulatory interference required to make LLU work (e.g. to set the price) is detrimental to the market.

New entrants, on the other hand, argue that, since they cannot economically duplicate the incumbent's local loop, they cannot actually provide certain services, such as ADSL, without LLU, thus allowing the incumbent to monopolise the respective market and stifle innovation. They point out that alternative access technologies, such as Wireless local loop (WLL) have proven uncompetitive and/or impractical, and that under current pricing models, the incumbent is guaranteed a fair price for the use of his facilities, including an appropriate return on investment. Finally, they argue that the ILECs generally did not construct their local loop in a competitive, risk-fraught environment, but under state monopoly protection and using taxpayer money, which means - according to the new entrants - that ILECs ought not to be entitled to continue to extract monopoly rents from the local loop.

Most developed nations, including the USA and the EU Member States, have introduced regulatory frameworks providing for LLU.

ILEC = incumbent local exchange carrier (Telecom in NZ's case)