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macnn/electronista

03/28/2008, 10:30am, EDT

Friday, March 28th

New New Zealand network to mean iPhones?

An expansion to New Zealand's cellular networks may open the way for the iPhone, a research firm observes. TeleGeography says it has learned from Telecom New Zealand's director of mobile operations, Martin Butler, that it is a "good inference" that the company will bring over the iPhone. It is in the middle of building a new, $300 million NZD ($241.2 million US) GSM/EDGE network, which should support the 850MHz frequency of the iPhone. Commercial rollout of the network is expected sometime in November, and should reach 97 percent of New Zealand's population.

Butler notes that while the network will also support 3G broadband, this will only initially cover the country's three major cities, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. To achieve anything above EDGE -- a "2.5G" technology -- many users will need to fall back to the company's CDMA network, which supports EVDO Revision A.


Filed under: iPhone, industry
Other story tags: EDGE, GSM, New Zealand, Telecom New Zealand

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220767 03/28, 10:47am, EDT Meaningless
Vodafone NZ aready has complete coverage of NZ with GSM and 3G. Telecom's upgrade is hardly news of the iPhone. Telecom made a gamble on CDMA and they lost. They're not having to play catch up with Vodafone who had a GSM network from the start. However, both companies skipped EDGE and went straight to 3G, for the iPhone to be of any use in NZ we need the 3G one.

posted by rytc

220768 03/28, 10:48am, EDT not
Sorry I mean Telecom are 'now' having to play catch-up

posted by rytc

220839 03/28, 6:25pm, EDT Vodafone FTW
I will continue to use my unlocked iPhone on Vodafone. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING could ever make me switch to become a Telecom customer again (Even an official iPhone).

I've just escaped Telecom's Broadband monopoly for my Naked DSL plan, and I will never be a customer of them again after years of frustration with their general incompetence and poor service with anything Telco related.

Hopefully by the time a 3G iPhone is released, Vodafone come out with a better data plan for Prepay users

posted by the_snitch

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