Ultrafast broadband set for next month

Telecom chief executive Simon Moutter says the company should begin selling services based on the government-backed ultrafast broadband network next month.

But he indicated trials with staff had shown there were still issues that needed to be ironed out before people could be certain of a smooth connection experience. Vodafone chief executive Russell Stanners expressed similar concerns last year.

Telecom has been rocked this week by the hacking of its outsourced YahooXtra email service and yesterday missed out on a high-profile contract to provide mobile technology to the police. The contract was won by arch-rival Vodafone.

Speaking at an event organised by the Telecommunications Users Association in Wellington, Moutter made no reference to the setbacks but said it did not want to further cede its 50 per cent share of the broadband market. He indicated it would not necessarily chase growth in that market, however.

"We need to become a competitive, agile, future-oriented mobile and data centric-service provider. It is quite a big change in culture," he said.

Police said they would provide 6500 police with smartphones and 3900 with tablet computers at an initial cost of $4.3m.

Telecom had previously supplied mobile technology that let police track the location of some police cars. Those systems became redundant following the demise of Telecom's CDMA-based mobile network which was turned off last year.

- © Fairfax NZ News