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New Zealand To Bring Ultrafast Internet To 85 Percent Of Population (stuff.co.nz)
Ultrafast broadband is coming to more than another 200,000 homes, but doubts are already being expressed that the expansion of the network isn't quite ambitious enough. From a report: Another 423,000 people will be able get ultrafast broadband (UFB) by the end of 2024 as a result of a long-awaited decision to expand the network. Prime Minister Bill English said UFB would be extended to more than 151 additional towns, on top of the 33 cities that are already getting the service. The expansion will mean UFB will be available to "up to 85 per cent" of the population, up from the 75 per cent coverage that is planned to be delivered by 2020.
Unfortunately for New Zealand, Ultrafast is relative. They're at the end of the cable. New Zealand connects to Australia which connects to Asia which connects to Europe and North America.
Since many websites are hosted on severs on "the other end of the cable" they have to bounce around many servers and potential bottlenecks before they get to the server they seek. Sites based in the US and Europe may still take a long time to load for the kiwis.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Yet again, up to the readers to do the job of the editors for them. How fast exactly is Ultra-Fast? Here is an extract from the New Zealand UFB page which also makes it clear that it is a replacement of existing ADSL with FTTH.
In particular UFB upload speeds are typically at between 10-50 times faster than ADSL’s average 1MB/s upload.
The most popular offerings (utilising GPON technology) are currently:
– 30Mb/s download, 10Mb/s upload
– 100Mb/s download, 50Mb/s upload
Businesses and other organisations are able to purchase P2P (Point-to-Point) UFB fibre connections of up to 1Gigabit/s (1000Mb/s).
Editors - get a clue.When you take news articles from all sorts of publications and present them to a largely homogenous readership, you can put in a little bit of additional effort to account for any assumptions the original sources may have made about their readers. Do not teach the slashdot crowd what JavaScript is. Do not assume everybody reading this story on Slashdot is from New Zealand and knows details of what UFB is.
With an small download cap!
In USA, we much rather charge more for less than build out infrastructure.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Have you seen how big the US is compared to even ... Europe? Seattle to Miami is about the same distance as London is from Tel Aviv.
AND we have large chunks of land that have "Ultra Low" populations (Wyoming, Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska ...) where feasibility outside a few population centers is nearly impossible.
Ho hum.
The population density of New Zealand is 17½ per sq.km. The population density of the US is 35 per sq.km (about double New Zealand's), and even higher if Alaska is removed from the calculation. So you fail on the first measure.
The large chunks of land with ultra low populations makes the population density even higher in those areas which have populations. Again, you fail.
About 5% (let's be generous, and say 10%) of the US population has access to more than 100Mbps down and 50Mbps up. New Zealand is due to deliver it to 85% of theirs within a couple of years.