Hon David Cunliffe
Minister of Communications
Minister for Information Technology

21 December 2005
Media Statement

Telco benchmarking report highlights that the race is on

"Some progress has been made but there's much more to be done," said Communications Minister David Cunliffe about the release of a telecommunications benchmarking report today.

The report, which is prepared each year by the Ministry of Economic Development, assesses the performance of the New Zealand telecommunications services market against other OECD countries. Mr Cunliffe said that there are some services on which New Zealand compares favourably with OECD countries.

"But in general, there is a significant gap between New Zealand's pricing performance and that of countries in the top half of the OECD." The report says that New Zealand has good broadband access availability but that uptake of broadband is still lagging behind other OECD countries. "The percentage of households with broadband in New Zealand still lags behind the OECD average" said Mr Cunliffe.

Overall rankings for fixed network residential and business telephone services remained in the third quartile of the OECD. Cellular telephone service performance ranked in the bottom half of the OECD.

Mr Cunliffe says that this report is a useful input into the Government's current stocktake of the telecommunications market.

"Under the Digital Strategy, New Zealand has committed to being in the top quarter of the OECD for broadband uptake by 2010."

"This report suggests that we need some significant changes to get us there."

The full report is available online from the Ministry of Economic Development website

http://www.med.govt.nz/pbt/telecom/benchmarking/index.html

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