Fibre competition not strong enough to deregulate

In this edition:Wholesale fibre deregulation to continueGovernment sells Chorus debtData centre planned for Taranaki CommComm opts for status quoThe Commerce Commission says competition in New Zealand’s wholesale fibre market still isn’t strong enough to justify deregulating three services.It recommends continuing regulation of point-to-point, transport, and co-location and interconnection services after finding that rival fibre networks remain too patchy to provide a meaningful constraint on the local fibre companies.Writing in a draft recommendation to the minister, the Commission says there are pockets of genuine competition but not enough of it.Point-to-pointPoint-to-point provides the clearest example of where competition has emerged. The Commission looked at competition around individual points of interconnection and found five suburbs where two or more competing fibre networks reach at least 70 percent of addresses.Five suburbs are not enough to establish competition across a…