Screeb: Never. Welcome to New Zealand...

sbiddle:
When people realise that internet bandwidth costs big $$ and that you that the words "cheap" and "fast" can't be used in the same sentence.

If a second cable ever gets build I suspect things would change dramatically. There is certainly enough bandwidth on the SX cable to give us all much much better international speeds than we currently experience, but as sbiddle pointed out, capacity on this cable is very expensive.

My understanding is that the cable usually sits at below 15% utilization, which seems kind of wasteful, especially when there is talk of building a second cable.

Ultimately however, as it is, the owners of the SX cable (aside: Telecom have a large stake in it) basically have a monopoly, building a second cable would probably mean that prices come down for international capacity (competition) dramatically.

This is a long way off however and requires a HUGE amount of CAPEX. Any really, why would you bother? SX currently enjoy supernormal profits, however with competition these would quickly erode back to normal profits, which kind of removes the incentive for a second providers to spend all that cash building another cable.

sbiddle: When do we expect to get these speeds?

adamj:

This is a long way off however and requires a HUGE amount of CAPEX. Any really, why would you bother? SX currently enjoy supernormal profits, however with competition these would quickly erode back to normal profits, which kind of removes the incentive for a second providers to spend all that cash building another cable.

webup: Im dreading returning to nz if the speeds and caps are as bad as some say but we'll see.

sbiddle: When do we expect to get these speeds?

When people realise that internet bandwidth costs big $$ and that you that the words "cheap" and "fast" can't be used in the same sentence.

adamj:

This is a long way off however and requires a HUGE amount of CAPEX. Any really, why would you bother? SX currently enjoy supernormal profits, however with competition these would quickly erode back to normal profits, which kind of removes the incentive for a second providers to spend all that cash building another cable.