Yep, I was being slightly disingenuous as I'm sure plenty of ISP queues are taken up by Auntie Doris who has mistaken her remote control for a phone and is now complaining that it doesn't work.
It's still a relatively new technology - not sure if I have an answer for that problem, apart from time and education.
Doesn't have to be isp. Look at when there was a bit of a blow in auckland and vectors number was as good as useless. Yet there was still great information flowing over twitter and Facebook about what faults were happening etc.
richms: And not everyone buys from places that are soley competing on price. So just because the cheap ones can run a duopoly or triopoly at whatever price they choose there will still be plenty of people that want proper service and a different offering from the smaller ISPs, just like loads of people shop at new world, faro and nosh, and everyone doesnt go to pak n save for a cheap aweful shopping experiance.
At the end of the day most food is a commodity, no matter where you buy it from, and most people will buy from those stores. You will also find that the two companies in the duopoly also have their own premium brands of store that offer more specialist foods and have more plesent environments, and and compete in the top end of the market.
I am not sure if ISPs are totally a commodity item, as some ISPs are more reliable than others. When I was with one ISP I was regularly having connection problems, but when I changed ISP, I never had the problems again, and also had better speeds, despite it being on the same connection. So they do differ. Electricity on the other hand is totally a commodity.
old3eyes: Can we kiss our Orcon email addresses for life goodbye now??
Nope. They can never ever take it away from you. That's what 'for life' means. If they take it away they open themselves up to a pretty serious comcom investigation. Think how many people may have signed up when they started promoting email for life. They would have to compensate everyone of them for misleading advertising. (This is why offering something 'for life' or promising you will 'never' do something is very short sighted)
They could easily take it away from you if the new owners so wished. The promise was made by an entity who no longer exists. Having said that, it will not be removed. They will have a hard enough time selling this idea, without annoying people even more by taking away their free thing. Personally though, I can't imagine why anyone would want an @orcon address for life! :)
Doesn't matter. The promise was made and would be something the new owners would have to have taken into account when making the purchases. It's a liability that they would acquire as part of acquiring orcon.
Legally this simply isn't true. Legally the new owners are not obliged to take the liabilities of a company. They will do so, because it would be stunningly bad PR to do otherwise.
But that would work both ways of course.
If no liabilities are carried over to the new owners, then customers "under contract" to Orcon would not longer be under contract and could change ISP without any early termination fee.
Are you subscribed to our RSS feed? You can download the latest headlines and summaries from our stories directly
to your computer or smartphone by using a feed reader.
Trusted
