The Commerce Commission will have every reason to feel quietly pleased with itself tomorrow, given the sudden outbreak of competition in New Zealand's telecommunications industry.
Telecom will finally launch its super fast XT mobile network tomorrow morning, and mark the occasion with a range of product giveaways for early shoppers at five of its retail and Leading Edge stores in Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington, Hamilton and Auckland.
Telecom will give the first person in line for the 7.30am opening at each of the five stores any XT mobile network phone of their choice, along with $1000 credit.
The remaining people in the line at each of the five stores will go into a draw to win other mobile gadgets and technology.
Vodafone, which successfully held up the launch of the new Telecom network by nearly two weeks through court action, is today offering customers $1 million of free airtime to "thank" them for their patience while it addressed network interference problems - trigger for the action against Telecom.
One thousand customers will be randomly selected from across New Zealand to each receive $1000 worth of airtime.
The $1000 can be used for calls, text messages, data, music downloads and other Vodafone services.
Not to be outdone, Orcon is offering its home and work broadband customers free data downloads from a selected range of New Zealand sites.
Starting with seven sites today, Orcon hopes to expand the range of free download sites.
The free data includes any uploading, downloading, streaming or general surfing.
Telecom is due to release its new pricing plans for the XT network tomorrow.
Analysts are confident that Vodafone will match any any price discounted by Telecom.
Meanwhile, the company working to launch this country's third mobile network is complaining to the Commerce Commission about Telecom.
2degrees said it would like to offer local home zone calling services over its new mobile network, but Telecom's refusal to interconnect effectively shut it out of the market.
Under home zone plans customers can drop their landline and have a mobile-only service, paying residential landline rates for calls made on their mobile when at home.
Bill McCabe, 2degrees chief commercial officer, described Telecom's behaviour as "bullying".
In 2006, the Commerce Commission determined that Telecom must provide interconnection to Vodafone on exactly the same terms that 2degrees was requesting, he said.
But Telecom said it had offered a commercial deal to 2degrees on the same terms as the agreement with Vodafone, and remained willing to negotiate such an arrangement.
Mr McCabe said 2degrees, which was due to launch in August, had tried for more than two years to reach an agreement with Telecom.
After exhausting every other reasonable avenue, it had started proceedings against Telecom with the commission.
