TeamTalk accuses TCF of immoral behaviour

Team Talk CEO David Ware has lashed out at the Telecommunications Carriers Forum in a strongly worded letter designed to spark debate on the TCF's move to take control of New Zealand's numbering plan.

“I decided that Numbering and the TCF are both pretty boring subjects - but I figured if I wrote something colourful people would read it and hopefully come to the same conclusion as I have - namely the TCF is no place to manage anything," he says.

In the letter Ware refers to the TCF as being a club that large telcos use to “bully the industry into submission” and “paste a veneer of respectability over their immoral behaviour.”

Team Talk is a publically listed mobile radio company that also owns CityLink – the Wellington based telco that has joined the New Zealand Regional Fibre Group and is bidding to be part of the government’s Ultra Fast Broadband network.

But it is over the issue of New Zealand’s numbering plan – and the move by the TCF to take over from the Numbering Administration Deed (NAD) – that has Ware fired up in the letter. He says the company quit the NAD, but they’ve still got a stack of blocks which amount to about two million numbers, so there is no reason to rejoin in the short term (currently only members of the NAD can buy New Zealand numbers).

TCF CEO David Stone says the TCF has no comment on the letter and will not be making a line by line rebuttal. However, he says it contains a number of inaccuracies - in particular Ware’s assertion that members of the public making complaints to the Telecommunications Disputes Resolution Scheme are prevented from discussing their case with the media.

Stone says he will continue to have a dialogue with Team Talk and with the other notable telco that remains absent from the TCF – 2degrees.

The letter

Here’s the letter to TCF CEO David Stone, dated 14 January 2010, which was copied to Telecommunications Commissioner Ross Patterson and MED deputy secretary Bruce Parkes. Please note that the final paragraph in the letter has been left out on legal grounds.

Dear David

When we met briefly last year I expressed my opinion that the TCF is nothing more than a club that a few large telecommunications companies use to buy the industry into submission and to and paste a veneer of respectability over their immoral behaviour.

I cited the Telecommunications Complaints Authority as an example of the TCF’s appalling behaviour – to insist that a member of the public sign a non disclosure agreement preventing them taking their issue to the press is reprehensible.

One of the cheap tactics that the big boys use to keep the minnows in line is to simply drown them in paperwork. Send out lengthy documents with a few  land mines hidden deep inside secure in theknowledge that the small players don’t have time to read them end to end – much less have the resources to challenge them.

You assured me that under your watch this would change. I then receive a 67 page report on proposed changes to the allocation of numbers. For f**k sake the least you could have done was include an executive summary.

Between the MED and the Telecommunications Commissioners office we are fortunate enough to have some of the best bureaucrats in country. They’re people with hard arsed commercial experience and with the guts to keep these f**kers in line. Between them they are eminently capable of managing a few telephone numbers.

So no, I don’t plan to join the TCF any time soon, and I totally oppose the TCF having any quasi regulatory authority for numbers or anything else – leave that stuff to the MED and the Commissioner.

Regards

David Ware.