These are good questions and is comes back to the LLU argument where everyone was so fired up about it being the end of all the problems, remember Annette Presely and Co on closeup, there were numerous consultations by Telecom with all service providers where they explained what they where doing with Cabinetisation, I am looking at the briefing documents now from June and September 2007 where they explained what they where doing to everyone, even have my hand written notes saying this will effect LLU performance.... let me stress all the service providers where there listerning to the same info we where !

The problem appeared to be that people where so focused on LLU that they didn't understand what the actual impact of shortening the loop was. This was not Telecoms fault at all, they where more than upfront with what they where doing and the reason they argued that LLU was not going to be the long term solution, LLU was only ever going to be economical if they had large coverage areas.

LLU equipment is effected by passing through cabinets this was never hidden and just a fact of what Telecom was rolling out to give better wholesale access products, absolutely nothing wrong with that and it was part of their commitments to the government to bring higher speeds to the majority of new Zealanders, the only way to do this was to shorten the copper and to be fair they where the only ones capable of doing it due to the geographical size and nature of our Telco infrastructure.

LLU was only every going to be deployed in the big exchanges with larger amount of customers i.e cherry picking but as the areas get smaller due to the cabinet rollout, LLU becomes less of a vialable option and also wholesale options from cabinets are always going to perform better as the copper is just shorter.. that's just a technicial fact !

So making statements around being illegal is pretty much way off the mark and unfounded but to be fair you won't have all the background information around this, I personally feel it's more around choices made by individual service providers and perhaps the people at these briefing not fully understanding the ramifications of LLU rollouts and the effect of cabinetisatiion, but once you have invested heavily in going down a path pretty hard to back away from it, you need to get a ROI so you need to keep customers on that product as along as possible.. Once you make your Cake you have to eat it