In my view, Chorus is now a very interesting company.

Earlier in the week someone was a little insulting and expressed their frustration in terms of 'monkeys'.  I agree with MF that name calling is not in order, and pondered since that I might make some comment.


The people that the poster was talking about aren't even working for Chorus, or at least, they're employed by Transfield and Downers, two contracting companies.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend as I was relaying comments made here.  He commented "actually, it's not far from the truth... many of the folk they employ are from countries where monkeys actually come from'.  He wasn't attempting to be funny but was actually being factual.

I can fully understand peoples frustrations when it comes to getting things fixed.

How many of you actually understand the dynamics of why we have these foreign workers working on our copper network and not the guys who built it and really understand it?

I suggest that there are a number of reasons that we need to consider and respect.

aa.  At present we're head down, bum up, building a new fibre network to 75% of homes.  This means that we have a truck load of 'the normal guys' doing design work and managing the building of a new network at the same time as trying to keep the existing one afloat.

bb.  World peace relies on different cultures knowing different cultures.  Chorus, Transfield and Downers, in my view, do a fantastic job of providing employment to a broad range of foreign folk.  This is very VERY important to New Zealand.  These are smart people who communicate well with other people in their native countries and bring us more tourists and more opportunities and helps to break down barriers.

This also helps to open doors of you (average kiwi student interested in working over seas).

cc.  Many of the guys who built our network are getting to retirement age and today's youth are not interested in training in copper skills and working on our aged networks in companies that don't appear to present much opportunity for advancement due to their retrenching size.

"DONT CARE JUST FIX MY COPPER NOW!!!"

I also think we need a little call to order on the copper/fibre migration issues.

So far we've now past 300,000 homes with less than 5% uptake.

New fibre is going to be truck loads more reliable than old copper.  That's a key reason for building this stuff.

We're just not connecting people and we should be!

Every single customer we take off the old dated copper network gets us a step closer to shutting it down and freeing up tech time to build fibre faster and deal with far less copper faults.

So, in short...

Let's show some real respect and appreciation to the folk who are still looking after our aging copper and help them out by getting people off it faster!

D

Disclaimer:  I don't work for any of these companies and they don't provide me with any direct employment or gain that I know of.  In face I am working on being more of a competitor.  I personally feel that we need to show folk working hard in this industry as much respect as we call.  I accept any comment that I haven't always been good at that either... perhaps with more gray hair I'm trying to get better at it! ;)