Kim.Com promises free broadband -Pacific Fibre to rise from the ashes?

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › Kim.Com promises free broadband -Pacific Fibre to rise from the ashes?

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#711709 4-Nov-2012 12:41

Gareth Morgan manages a Kiwisaver fund - ie; not just his own money.

I would not expect retirement funds to take on investments of this nature anyway.

There may or may not be a case for national interest type investments in this area but that is a whole different type of discussion and a completely different project in aims and outcome.

gzt

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#711710 4-Nov-2012 12:45

kyhwana2:
hamish225:
Kyanar:
BarTender: I'm just wondering why with Pacific Fibre that Sam Morgan's dad Gareth who does have a decent understanding of money wasn't throwing his kiwisaver investments behind it... Probably because it didn't stack up.

Because doing so would likely get him prosecuted? Investing money in a company owned by a family member is a conflict of interest and a fast track to an SFO investigation.

really? so you can't invest your own money into whatever company you want? that's not exactly fair, i thought we lived in a fair society here! obviously not.

This isn't the US, where you can run for president and have your son own the e-voting machines in a battleground state!

Mainly because (a) we don't have a presidential office and (b) because we do not have voting machines.

hamish225

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#711711 4-Nov-2012 12:53

gzt: Gareth Morgan manages a Kiwisaver fund - ie; not just his own money.

I would not expect retirement funds to take on investments of this nature anyway.

There may or may not be a case for national interest type investments in this area but that is a whole different type of discussion and a completely different project in aims and outcome.

oh i didn't realise we were talking about a bank manager, i thought we were talking about someone's personal funds, right that sounds more logical.

*Insert big spe*dtest result here*

jpoc

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#711715 4-Nov-2012 13:10

One thing that didn't make sense to me was the comment in the Herald to the effect that putting in a cable would attract global companies to site data centres here.

If a data centre is serving NZ then the pipe back to the rest of the world is irrelevant and if it is to serve the rest of the world then why on earth would you put it in NZ where the delay getting photons across the pacific and back would put your data centre a couple of hundred milliseconds behind your competition in terms of resposne?

DonGould

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#711722 4-Nov-2012 13:23

jpoc: One thing that didn't make sense to me was the comment in the Herald to the effect that putting in a cable would attract global companies to site data centres here.

If a data centre is serving NZ then the pipe back to the rest of the world is irrelevant and if it is to serve the rest of the world then why on earth would you put it in NZ where the delay getting photons across the pacific and back would put your data centre a couple of hundred milliseconds behind your competition in terms of resposne?

How is downloading or uploading big video file time dependent?

You have to consider all the costs and the business risk.

Have you read the content on Kim's me.ga web site?

The US has become to high risk to host your content. If you do something that causes you to fall out of political favour then your business can be taken off line. I didn't think that would be possible in .us, but I was wrong.

Promote New Zealand - Get yourself a .kiwi.nz domain name!!!

Check out mine - i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz - don@i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz

jpoc

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#711730 4-Nov-2012 13:48

DonGould:
jpoc: One thing that didn't make sense to me was the comment in the Herald to the effect that putting in a cable would attract global companies to site data centres here.

If a data centre is serving NZ then the pipe back to the rest of the world is irrelevant and if it is to serve the rest of the world then why on earth would you put it in NZ where the delay getting photons across the pacific and back would put your data centre a couple of hundred milliseconds behind your competition in terms of resposne?

How is downloading or uploading big video file time dependent?

You have to consider all the costs and the business risk.

Have you read the content on Kim's me.ga web site?

The US has become to high risk to host your content. If you do something that causes you to fall out of political favour then your business can be taken off line. I didn't think that would be possible in .us, but I was wrong.

How is your comment relevant to my post? I am not talking about another video sharing site the Mr Dotcom might setup. The Herald quoted Dotcom as saying "You have clean and cheap energy here. Power is becoming the biggest cost factor for data centres around the world. With its own cable, cheap power and connectivity New Zealand could attract foreign internet business." Would Facebook setup a data centre here and add a quarter second delay to every exchange of data between a user and their data centre? Would Amazon? Those internet businesses already spread their data centres out to be close to their markets in order to minimise latency.

I hardly think that Amazon, Facebook et al are more worried about the US attitude to sites like megaupload than they are about data centre response times.

gzt

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#711755 4-Nov-2012 14:27

It depends on the nature of the service. For some services the additional delay will remain tiny singular and not add up to anything noticeable. For other services that delay will tend to compound making service impractical.

Many web services had problems this week through Sandy but they could have hosted elsewhere in the US to avoid those risks.

NZ's power is not cheap by US standards either.

The non-nuclear/green power/hydro might be attractive from a marketing point of view + carbon neutral like a Prius taxi so there might be an edge for us there. Maybe it is enough for NZ to get a big enough slice of the market like those slow Hitachi green drives useful only for some things ; ).

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NonprayingMantis

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#711788 4-Nov-2012 15:25

Headline very misleading. Typical herald tabloid sensationalism. Only in fantasy land is international traffic the only cost of providing Internet to kiwis. Yes they aknowledge the difference a bit later, but even that is miles out

Orcon are doing unlimited ufb for 99 bucks. a fifth of that is 20 bucks. Excluding gst gets you to a supposed revenue of 17 bucks.

Cost e isp has tp pay tp their lfc of a ufb connection is 37.50 per month ex gst. Add on the other non-bandwidth related costs and you would have to get to at least 50 of total cost. Suggesting that ISPs, even with free traffic, will be willing to take a minimum $30 loss on every single connection is frankly laughable.

Lorenceo

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#711800 4-Nov-2012 15:54

If Kim Dotcom wants to help fund another cable out of NZ, I'm all for it.

kiwirock

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#711807 4-Nov-2012 16:07

Lorenceo: If Kim Dotcom wants to help fund another cable out of NZ, I'm all for it.

Agreed. It's that simple, if he wants to pay for it, go for it! It's all good.

raytaylor

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#711818 4-Nov-2012 16:30

kiwirock:
Lorenceo: If Kim Dotcom wants to help fund another cable out of NZ, I'm all for it.

Agreed. It's that simple, if he wants to pay for it, go for it! It's all good.

I too am all for it.
Residential consumers would still need to pay for the tail connections and in LFC areas, it would basically mean every ISP has virtually the exact same costs. End users would just pay the same fee for pretty much the same service. The only difference would be the helpdesk support - which company provides the better.

edit: I had an afterthought.
I say we re-write our copyright law, let him infringe (unknowingly via his website) as much as he likes.
In exchange we get a free pipe to the USA.
The GDP from data centres, call centres and technology industries that benefit from it will far outweigh our GDP from our movie industry very easily.

Screw the hobbit, i want free internet!

Ray Taylor

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gzt

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#711824 4-Nov-2012 16:41

Yes ok, but surely he has some business plan which makes the free part a sustainable reality?

If he wants to do it just for the good of NZ because he is generous and grateful for not instantly bundled off to the states in a black helicopter - well that's all good but I doubt that is what is on offer.

Will it be streaming media access with revenue gained from advertising? or something different? or combinations of things like that? It is not clear yet what he has in mind.

MikeB4

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#711842 4-Nov-2012 17:41

Why do I get the feeling Kim.com is taking the mickey.

Screeb

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#711906 4-Nov-2012 21:14

BarTender:
Lets reasses the facts.

1) 90% of SCCN usage goes to Australia, not NZ.
2) SCCN isn't anywhere near capacity and due to technology upgrades at head ends at to the cable the capacity is due to increase
3) The price of data from AU<->US and NZ<->US is the same
4) There is already multiple international cables in Australia so there is competition there.
5) It was first built in 2000 so has been running for 12 years now, so their investment must be either paid off or close to it
6) Year on year SCCN has been reducing their cost of wholesale capacity, how many other companies do you know that have been doing that for the last 12 years?

Point 3 is the only point that really matters when considering the other points - however, while 3 is in theory correct, in practice it's wrong. The prices are the same, but that's largely irrelevant, as the price per megabit is less when purchasing larger amounts. Since NZ ISPs are much smaller than AU ones, we don't get the same volume discounts that they do, so in effect "The price of data from AU<->US" is not the same as "NZ<->US".

So I'm not sure how a business case for another cable is impossible, given that they wouldn't even need to offer prices cheaper than SCC per se, they could just sell at the same per-mbps price, but in smaller blocks. Selling 10Gbps each to 10 companies costs no more than selling 100Gbps to one (ignoring the relatively small additional costs associated with dealing with more customers).

Anyway, I doubt anything will come of Dotcom's idea. Seems quite far-fetched. Whatever happened to that other international cable company that showed up a few months ago anyway? They were planning to go through a bunch of pacific islands and whatnot. Haven't heard anything since.

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#711918 4-Nov-2012 21:28

Damn, every time I see kim.com I read another domain, NSFW.

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