The Phone Saga in New Zealand

Recently Tau Henare, retiring MP for National, tweeted to Vodafone on why he can't just have broadband services and Cell services and no home phone.  I suspect their answer will come soon enough and I'll post it here.

But it got me thinking, the Math!

Let's say there is a phone account for every New Zealander?  Yeah I know, kids don't own home phone accounts but you can factor in business phone accounts to make up the shortfall.  So that's at least 4.5 million phone accounts.  I think at last look the Rental and Maintenance charge for a phone account was around $45 a month.  Over a year per account the two major Telcos are raking in off each account $540 per account.  Multiply that by the number of phone accounts (estimated remember) and that's a whopping $2.43 Billion a year!!

Seriously the question has to be asked, is all that money being spent on maintenance and line upkeep?  Or is it solely a cash cow for the telco's? We have to remember exchanges have all been upgraded with the best and latest technology and lines have been set in place for a good long time so there is little need for upgrading.  And are they using the majority of that income to upgrade Broadband services, which when done, should see a reduction in costs to the consumer.  Will it though?

In  a time where Broadband and Cellphones is the norm rather than the exception surely it is time those same telcos (particularly Spark (stupid fucken name) and Vodafone, pass on the lowered costs of having a home or business phone account with reduced maintenance and rental factors too (and naturally).