He pulls the spitting high tension wires down

We have heard a lot of talk lately about broadband infrastructure -- much of it in the Explaining Voice after a couple of beers, but the Frau Doktorin is used to that -- but also from the Government. Reinventing the economy, cutting edge of innovation, productivity gains through e-commerce, all that. I think this translates into "Not enough people are downloading bootlegged music and movies and porn, what with the shonky dial-up connection," which is impeding the gubblement's desire to clamp down on copyright violations like all the cool countries are doing, i.e. they need to facilitate the flow of information before they have an excuse to regulate it.

Anyway, this has exacerbated the rivalry among NZ telephony companies, vying for the lucrative contract to bring bit-torrents to every small town in the country and allow every isolated farm station to take its rightful place in the global bestiality-porn economy.
This is all very well and no skin off my nose to spite my face, but when those rival companies wake me up before noon with unseemly altercations out in the street, competing for the limited space available to install new cables while each trying to sabotage the other's overhead installations, then I have to say that the corporate-welfare market model has failed.

The Telecom team are at the left, trying to upgrade their existing copper cables to an ASDL x.616 protocol with old-fashioned lion-and-griffin-based poles. The Telstra-Saturn team are on the right, putting their faith in graphene-monolayer phonon conduction technology mounted on a state-of-the-art dragon hybrid pole.

The dragon was definitely making most noise.