On Wed, 16 Nov 2005 12:15, Andrew Errington wrote: > On Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:55, you wrote: > > I suspect that Telstra Clear is being cleaned up for sale. > > <snip> > > I would go along with that, but my other theory is that they have released > a poor set of offerings on cable to drive people away. There is only a > small cable system in the *whole* of New Zealand, and that is a bit of > residential Christchurch and a bit in Wellington. If ADSL is 'good enough' > and the wires are already there then I can't see the cable system > expanding, and in fact maintaining two systems might be too expensive. > > Solution- drive your cable customers away and scrap the cable system to get > rid of ongoing maintenance costs. > > Having said that Telstra's ADSL offerings don't look too good to me either- > maybe they don't want any customers?
My suspicion is that population of Christchurch has been used as a collection of laboratory rats to discover whether or not rolling out Cable in larger Australasian cities would be commercially successful. As I understand it they discovered that:- 1) Cable TV, as they presented it, was a commercial flop. Not surprising as it is/was basically the same mind-rotting junk as is available off the free-to-air stations, but at a considerable weekly cost. 2) Fast(ish) Internet access was far, far more popular than they ever expected. They have their experimental results now and are leaving cleaning up the mess to somebody else. -- CS
