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NZ Plan For Fiber To the Home
Ars has a note about New Zealand's plans for nationwide broadband access, which will induce envy in many North American readers. "New Zealand has decided not to sit around while incumbent DSL operators milk the withered dugs of their cash cow until it keels over from old age. Instead, the Kiwis have established a government-owned corporation to invest NZ$1.5 billion for open-access fiber to the home. By 2020, 75 percent of residents should have, at a bare minimum, 100Mbps down/50 Mbps up with a choice of providers. Crown Fibre Holdings Limited is the company, and it's wholly owned by the government — for now — and the company's mission couldn't be any clearer. Two of its six guiding principles include 'focusing on building new infrastructure, and not unduly preserving the "legacy assets" of the past' and 'avoiding "lining the pockets" of existing broadband network providers.'"
I spent a month in NZ at a friends house a year ago, and the internet connections where like we had in Finland 10 years ago... Or even worse. They had an ADSL connection limited to 1Mb/s down (and very slow up) with a 2GB monthly limit. After the limit is full it would throttle down to 5KB/s for the rest of the month. The price of the connection was more then I payed for a full rate (8/1) ADSL back at home, with no caps. I guess if this was somewhere far in the countryside I could understand it, but it was in one of the better areas of Auckland!
I do have to admit, that internet connections were far more expensive in Finland too until they made a law forcing telco's to rent out the last mile with pricing based on the true expenses rather to what they feel like. This brought a lot of competition that ended up lowering prices by about half in all areas worth competing in. You still have areas in the country side where the only company offering ADSL is the "old telco" of the area, but that's just because there really is no money to be made. In most of the country the situation improved dramatically, and looking how the government has originally subsidized building the infrastructure I feel the decision was a good one. You can't count on telco's bringing down prices of internet connections, or speeding them up by much.
We think so too - regards, Australia
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yet, this corporation doesn't take into account New Zealand's main bottle-neck: the Southern Cross Cable. Only having one link to the rest of the internet, and that link is owned by a for-profit business, makes for piss-poor international bandwidth. Luckily, there are some people making some noise about laying another cable, just so there's no longer a monopoly and we might actually get some decent speeds.
Yep it appears to be modeled at least partly on the Australian National Broadband Network, although it will no doubt be modified somewhat to suit the NZ telecommunications market, geography and requirements.
Incidentally, actual consumer plans on the new (Australian) network (which has several trial areas already wired up) have just been announced in the last week or two. And they are better value than comparable DSL plans (in terms of download quota), despite the far greater speeds. This will come as a pleasant surprise to those that feared that new, faster tech would also mean more expense.
Taking a look at one ISPs NBN offerings, initial launch speeds are 25/2, 50/4 and 100/8 Mbit (downstream/upstream), with a choice of quotas from 15 GB (entry level) to 200 GB. And these prices will almost certainly come down further once the NBN is available in more than just a handful of trial areas and more ISPs come on board. I actually suspect we'll eventually see true unlimited plans becoming common (some ISPs such as TPG and AAPT are offer this now, albeit expensively!)
I suspect though that NZers will get their network completed before Australia does due to their smaller land area though (and potentially less political infighting!). Good to see it happening on both sides of the Tasman. Copper POTS networks are on their way out. They have served well for ~100 years, but everyone knows replacing them with fibre is inevitable. Might as well start the job now.
First of all we should be able to mark the article a troll. That's just ridiculous.
Second that's only 355 USD per person I'm guessing they're not going to get everybody for that.
FFS learn some math.
$355 per person over 10 years is dirt cheap.
It's not even the price of one month's extra internet service per year.
And no, they're not going to get everyone. The title of TFA is "75% of New Zealanders to get 100Mbps fiber by 2020"
Could you fail any harder?
Here's how it works: every fiber builder who takes government money needs to lay basic, unmanaged dark fiber that any ISP can light in order to offer service to a particular home or business. The fiber companies can also run some particular Layer 2 services, but they can't offer full-blown Internet access directly. Instead, they are allowed to sell Internet access to their own retail unit so long as it operates like a separate business, and all other ISPs must be offered access at the same rate.
That is the kind of competition most capitalists talk about, but rarely see in the real world.
If New Zealand doesn't end up with higher speeds and lower costs, I'll eat a sheep's eye.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Yes and no. The thing is, there's 2 parts needed for a connection: some kinda physical link, and suitable tranceivers in each end of the physical link. Changing the physical link (the copper-pair or the optical fibre) is expensive and difficult. Changing the tranceivers on the ends of an existing cable, on the other hand, is as simple as buying a new faster modem (i.e. the consumer can do it himself, and the cost can be less than $100.)
We've got fibre. The current tranceiver is just capable of 1Gbps, but that's just because currently there's no demand for more, and faster tranceivers are expensive today. (infact we're currently subscribing for only 100Mbps of internet-connectivity, so they artificially limit us in their router) If in a decade a gigabit seems puny, the actual physical fibre is capable of at least 1Tbps, with TODAYS tranceivers. (yes, those things are expensive today, but so where gigabit ethernet-cards, once upon a time)
So short answer: Once you've got a decent-quality single-mode fibre to your basement, you've got enough bandwith in the fibre for a while. I don't want to guess if/when a terabit to your home is going to start feeling puny, but I doubt it'll be this decade.
Data limits won't change. Fibre-to-the-home doesn't magically increase the bandwidth of transoceanic cables. Bandwidth in and out of NZ will still be just as expensive, so the transfer caps will stay in force.
If New Zealand doesn't end up with higher speeds and lower costs, I'll eat a sheep's eye.
Eat one anyway.
They're good, surprisingly crunchy if cooked properly (quickly grilled by itself, or roasted in the sheep's head). Don't just leave it boiling in a soup - it will dissolve into mush.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Telecom like to give good deals to xtra. An ISP that is a telecom subsidiary. The rest pay full price. I have friends working in NZ ISP's (I did myself at one point) and what goes on behind the curtain is pretty insane. NZ Telecom is so blatantly anti competitive at an illegal level its a total joke. And the consumer watch dog does SFA. Its also difficult to raise the issues legally as telecom will have "technical issues" with your adsl customers, and you go out of business before anything gets done.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Well think of it this way. In the mobile space, there are data caps to prevent a few users leeching 24/7 and completely saturating the available spectrum and ruining the service for everyone else. It gives network operators some predictability of utilisation and allows them to plan and provision their networks better as a result.
That hasn't been as necessary in the fixed line/wired space (in the US) because there is more bandwidth available, and most content that is accessed is domestic. There are dozens/hundreds of routes and networks an ISP can use to get the few hundred or thousands of miles to the remote hosts that the users are usually accessing. The amount of an ISPs traffic that needs to leave the ISPs domestic network or immediate peers is fairly small.
Australia and New Zealand on the other hand are English speaking countries, 15,000 km from where most English content is hosted. 90% of the content Australians access is hosted in North America (or the UK). But there are only a handful of large capacity pipes to the US. They are expensive to lay and maintain. And they aren't owned by the ISPs themselves. The pipes themselves aren't lacking in bandwidth, per se (there's plenty of spare capacity in SXC and PPC1 which are the two main AU-US routes), but that bandwidth is more expensive in the first place.
Not only that, but from the ISPs perspective, 95% of their damn traffic has to be pulled from the other side of the planet, and from OUTSIDE their domestic network. This is why AU/NZ is different than say, Korea or Japan (who have lightning fast Internet, but are accessing 99% domestic content!). In the US, an ISP with a decent domestic network has most of its traffic remaining inside that network, or passing cheaply to other US domestic carriers. In Australia virtually ALL traffic has to get routed outside the ISPs own network and on to the US via a handful of expensive 10,000 km long cables. Data caps allow AU and NZ ISPs to stay in business and not instantly go bankrupt (or unless you want to be paying $500 a month for service!).
Also yeah, 10 GB is ridiculous but it's fine for someone like my mother who just checks her email once a day (in fact she uses under 1 GB per month). Besides, it's not like higher caps aren't available (10 GB would be an entry level plan only!). I'm on 60 GB/month and it suits my needs fine. And I can upgrade if I need to.
One other thing - metered access also has a silver lining: net neutrality issues like you have in the US aren't a concern. It also means ISPs don't have to do QoS/deep packet inspection/slowing your torrents, since again, you pay for what you use.
So because the copper's fine in your area, it's magically alright throughout the rest of Australia? Whenever it rains heavily around here we get the usual spike of complaints of faulty lines. It's not just restricted to rural areas either. Back in 2008 parts of Sydney were so bad they were resorting to plastic baggies to (try to) stop the water getting into the wiring in the pits, so much so the Telstra techs nicknamed the city "Baghdad".
Want to enter Australia? You have to declare you're carrying pornography (yes, I am naked under my clothes)!
IME, most countries have a question about whether you're in possession of pornography or other obscene material on their entry cards. Australia is hardly unique in that.