Everyone hates their telco until it stops working

There are few relationships in modern life as quietly resentful as the one between a person and their telco. You do not love your telco. Nobody loves their telco. At best, you tolerate it in the same way you tolerate insurance, power bills and the app you only open when something has gone wrong. The ideal telco relationship is not delight. It is absence. You want the thing to work so consistently that you never have to think about the company behind it.

That is what makes telcos such a strange business to lead. If the network works, nobody thanks you. If the network drops, the entire country briefly becomes a telecommunications expert with a personal grievance and a screenshot. People expect coverage everywhere, speed always, roaming without trauma, customer service without hold music, and prices that somehow acknowledge both inflation and their personal feeling that data should be basically free by now. It is a miserable expectation set, and also a completely fair one, because connectivity stopped being a nice-to-have years ago.

That is the real story behind Jason Paris stepping down as CEO of One New Zealand after almost eight years. The company announced on 1 July that Paris had advised the board of his decision to step down, with Nick Macken appointed chief executive from 1 September. The official version is tidy: leadership transition, strong shareholder returns, innovation, customer focus, long-term value creation. All of that may be true, but the more interesting question is what the next version of One NZ has to become in a country where connectivity is now part utility, part identity, part emergency service and part customer-service battleground.

Paris was not a background CEO. He was visible, sometimes very visible, in a category that usually prefers to be boring. He led Vodafone New Zealand through the shift into One NZ, with the company moving away from the global Vodafone brand and into a more local identity. That rebrand mattered because telcos are rarely just telcos anymore. They are national infrastructure with marketing departments, and the name on the bill carries more emotional weight than anyone wants to admit. “One New Zealand” was not exactly a shy name. It was a flag in the ground, or at least an attempt to make a phone company sound like it belonged here.

The company also pushed into one of the more interesting connectivity stories in the country: satellite-to-mobile coverage. One NZ’s partnership with Starlink became part of its pitch around reaching parts of Aotearoa that traditional mobile coverage struggles to serve. On paper, that is innovation. In real life, it is also deeply practical. New Zealand is awkwardly shaped, sparsely populated in places, full of weather, hills, remote roads and people who still expect their phone to work when the map starts looking empty. Coverage here is not just a convenience story. It is a safety story, a business story and, for anyone who has ever lost service at the wrong moment, a sanity story.

That is where the telco conversation gets more interesting than phone plans. The boring stuff has become civic. A network outage is not just annoying because someone cannot scroll. It can affect payments, work, travel, emergency communications, small businesses, families, logistics and the general feeling that the country is functioning properly. We used to talk about connectivity as if it was a lifestyle upgrade. Now it is closer to plumbing. You only notice how essential it is when it fails.

This is why everyone is so brutal about telcos. The anger is not only about customer service, although customer service has done plenty to earn the reputation. It is about dependence. People hate being dependent on companies they do not fully understand, especially when those companies communicate in plan names, bundle offers, technical caveats and cheerful app notifications. A telco can spend millions explaining its brand, but the customer’s emotional memory is usually one of three things: the last outage, the last confusing bill, or the last time they had to explain the same issue to four different people.

One NZ is not alone in that. The entire category has the same problem. Spark, 2degrees, One NZ, broadband providers, mobile operators, all of them sit inside a national expectation that connectivity should feel effortless and cost less. The product is invisible until it becomes painful. That makes it culturally thankless but commercially powerful. Everyone complains, everyone pays, everyone threatens to switch, then everyone discovers the next provider is also a telco, which is to say a different flavour of the same emotional contract.

The optimistic read is that this is exactly why leadership matters now. The next phase of telco in New Zealand should not be about who can make the loudest ad or the most confusing bundle sound generous. It should be about trust. Can people understand what they are paying for? Can they get help without feeling punished for needing it? Can the network keep improving outside the easy parts of the map? Can the company treat connectivity less like a product and more like public confidence with a monthly fee attached?

That sounds earnest, but it is the actual game. New Zealand is only going to become more dependent on its networks. AI, cloud tools, remote work, digital payments, streaming, smart homes, satellite coverage, rural connectivity, emergency resilience and whatever horrible new device category arrives next will all sit on top of pipes most people never see. The companies that run those pipes will either become more trusted or more hated. There is not much middle ground when your product is the thing everyone needs before they can complain about anything else.

That is what makes One NZ’s CEO change worth more than a business-page skim. A telco leadership change is not usually culturally exciting, but this one lands at a time when the category is being forced to grow up. Connectivity is no longer a bundle of minutes, texts and data. It is how people work, move, pay, panic, organise, parent, study, date, sell things, find each other and keep going when the country gets messy.

The next boss of One NZ does not need to make people love their telco. That is probably impossible, and maybe not even desirable. The better goal is simpler and harder: make the company feel less like something people endure and more like something they can trust. Make the network stronger, the service clearer, the pricing less irritating, and the promise of better coverage actually mean something when someone is outside the comfortable parts of the map.

Everyone hates their telco until it stops working. Then they remember it might be one of the most important companies in their life.