At least in principle, a major test of Long Term Evolution and its ability to provide a viable alternative to fixed network broadband access could occur in New Zealand, the big issue being tariffs.
Telecom New Zealand has launched its new “Ultra Fibre” services to businesses and consumers in New Zealand, offering consumers “up to” 30 Mbps service, with a 10 Mbps upsream.
Vodafone’s Long Term Evolution service in New Zealand already offers downstream speeds up to 70 Mbps, and upstream speeds up to 11 Mbps.
So all other things being equal, Vodafone should stand a fair chance of grabbing more customers than Telecom New Zealand.
Of course, all other things are not equal. Vodafone’s mobile broadband offers do not compare favorably with Telecom New Zealand’s offers, either on a “price per bit” basis or in terms of total usage that comes with a monthly bucket. For roughly NZ, $100, a Vodafone New Zealand customer gets a bucket of usage of 2 Gbytes.
The same amount spend on Telecom New Zealand’s new “Ultra Fibre” network would get a usage bucket of 50 gigabytes.
What Vodafone would have to decide, to make a serious run at the “Ultra Fibre” service is reconfigure its usage caps and price-per-bit packages to be more nearly comparable.
But Vodafone also owns a big hybrid fiber coax network in New Zealand, and would not want to risk upsetting market pricing for broadband overall, nor risk an order of magnitude potential increase in “typical” demand on its LTE network.
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