This is a good start. When you accidentally leave your data on and your smartphone usage costs more than the ticket to Sydney, you know there's a market failure at play.

ICT Minister Steven Joyce and his counterpart in Australia Senator Stephen Conroy will be looking at the situation this year. I hope they agree there is a problem and that they tell their officials to sort it out.

The other impressive anecdote from that conference relevant to our local scene was a statement by the European Commission's Bernd Langeheine, the director of electronic communications in what is the EU's civil service.

You may be aware of a long fight in the 2000s between the European Commission and the German government over the regulation of Deutsche Telekom's (DT) cabinet-based VDSL network.

The Germans were intent on giving a regulatory holiday, allegedly to incentivise the investment that DT was always intending to make.