FTTH/Quad-play in New Zealand

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#352742 17-Jul-2010 17:22

mgcarley:
sbiddle: Mind explaining how you can wire a house for triple play services for $200 here in New Zealand?

In an urban area, from my gate to where all our jacks are is about 20m - 1 cable going to 1 jack plus ends comes to between $70 and $80. Plus labour and incidentals.

Internal wiring of your house is not our responsibility, so naturally I'm not including that - like I said, a basic install - and the CPE comes with 802.11n, so you might not even have to install ethernet cables to your PC/laptop.

Most people won't have an ethernet port in their TV, so all they need to do is install new or re-route existing Co-Ax, but even then not that many people (in older houses) have Co-AX connectors in the wall - they just run it around the skirting board. You can buy Co-Ax for a few cents per meter.

As for VOIP, well... just change your cables from BT to RJ-11 or buy a $9 adapter and keep everything plugged in as it is - again, depending on how your phone is set up. In my house all our phones run from 1 jack. In many cases this is not so and so some other configuration/installation may need to be done.

Now that you've clarifired the $200 install fee doesn't cover any wiring we're now on the same wavelength.

So you're going to expect the end user to do all of this themsevles? You're dreaming if you do. I'd also suggest that you've done very little in the way of research to establish how poor internal wiring for both phone and TV is in your average NZ household.

You need to be providing these services and to a professional standard. The issue every FTTH provider around the world has to grapple with is the cost of install. If you want to be taken seriously you'll need to ensure that minimum specs are delivered upon - and if you're not good luck delivering a VoIP service that won't be required by law to have big stickers on it warning customers that it doesn't meet TCF guidelines for emergency services calling.

mgcarley

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#352750 17-Jul-2010 17:36

cyril7:
I wish you the best with your endevour but somehow I see many obstacles in NZ context.

Even putting aside the UFB strategy that CFH is putting forward, the other major player how may pop your vision is good old Telecom, who currently has fibre to within 1-1.5km of 80% of houses in the country, so I suspect they could put a hole in any $ concept you have at every turn.

Yeah they probably could, but why should that stop me? People said the same thing about India and cable operators there, but my biggest obstacle has been the sloth-like pace of bureaucracy.

As mentioned earlier your costings might work in india, no one is going to do what you think for those prices, then again I probably dont have a clue.

Cyril

As mentioned earlier, these are costings given to me in New Zealand by a New Zealand company who is building networks.

In India my cabling works out to a little over US$6 per month per subscriber, the main reason for which is because I have to pay every year for the connection between the CO and each neighbourhood, otherwise it would be US$6 per month per subscriber for 1 year.

The fiber cost works out to be about the same, except for labour, which is comparatively very very cheap, but because we're supplying mostly to apartments, the topography is significantly different to NZ. Here we have to do a 300% scale horizontal version of what we do vertically there: taking my street for example which has about 10 houses, with 10 houses backing on to those sections making for a total of 20 houses on the block... in essence, I can treat them like a larger scale apartment complex.

ascroft

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#352752 17-Jul-2010 17:39

Lets set this up on i-predict - if you can do it, you would clean up big time - probably pay for the build......

common sense is not very common

mgcarley

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#352770 17-Jul-2010 18:27

sbiddle:
Now that you've clarifired the $200 install fee doesn't cover any wiring we're now on the same wavelength.

So you're going to expect the end user to do all of this themsevles? You're dreaming if you do. I'd also suggest that you've done very little in the way of research to establish how poor internal wiring for both phone and TV is in your average NZ household.

You need to be providing these services and to a professional standard. The issue every FTTH provider around the world has to grapple with is the cost of install. If you want to be taken seriously you'll need to ensure that minimum specs are delivered upon - and if you're not good luck delivering a VoIP service that won't be required by law to have big stickers on it warning customers that it doesn't meet TCF guidelines for emergency services calling.

That's why I said a basic install would cost about that much. Telecom or anyone else will charge you about $250 for the same sort of basic install for those that have an alarm or whatever but because we wouldn't need to tinker with anything like that, it's a slightly smaller problem.

Even then, the main cost in installing extra cabling to supply the TV or whatever would be mostly labour, because from the main CPE (customer equipment) to the various devices is basically standard ethernet.

We probably wouldn't use existing telephone wiring unless the house is relatively new and outfitted already with a wiring closet, patch panel and Cat5e/Cat6, so in most areas, that's a non issue, otherwise existing wiring could be retrofitted to feed off of the VOIP port in the CPE but this is not a preferred route and rarely worth doing.

TV wiring would depend on what has been installed already. Some wiring is adequate, other wiring is not.

Each user premises has it's own nuances and challenges and whatnot, so we'd need to take it as it comes for those wanting all 3 services.

1080p

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#352796 17-Jul-2010 19:40

I am highly impressed with your ideas, you seem very organised and to have thought about this thoroughly. As for bringing international pipes into NZ I am very encouraged to hear this. I'd love to see a Singapore link developed and links from India/Taiwan sound good too. The more the better in my mind.

As for fibre to my place, I am extremely keen to acquire this! If you have the business plan I will be your customer.

I like what you mention about data plans for broadband. I find ISPs here are missing the larger sized plans (for more cash of course). I see no mid-range plans for 300-500GB offered anywhere.

There are a couple of 'unlimited' plans offered (Actrix & ThinAir) for ~$500 per month but I'm not sure exactly how 'unlimited' they are. I'd love to see a premium level of broadband data usage available to consumers here. I hope fibre will provide this and we'll be able to transition to larger and larger data limits.

sbiddle

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#352799 17-Jul-2010 19:48

1080p: I am highly impressed with your ideas, you seem very organised and to have thought about this thoroughly. As for bringing international pipes into NZ I am very encouraged to hear this. I'd love to see a Singapore link developed and links from India/Taiwan sound good too. The more the better in my mind.

More isn't necessarily better.

The reality is the bulk of the internet traffic is generated from North America and Europe. Very little of what we're interestred in is hosted in Asia so I fail to see any great need for significant bandwidth to these countries. We need fatter pipes to destinations where we get our content from, not just pipes to random countries.

While they can be used as transit points it's crazy to route traffic from NZ to the USA via Singapore.

kyhwana2

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#352808 17-Jul-2010 20:31

sbiddle:

More isn't necessarily better.

The reality is the bulk of the internet traffic is generated from North America and Europe. Very little of what we're interestred in is hosted in Asia so I fail to see any great need for significant bandwidth to these countries. We need fatter pipes to destinations where we get our content from, not just pipes to random countries.

While they can be used as transit points it's crazy to route traffic from NZ to the USA via Singapore.

I'd be interested to see what the asian immigrants/residents/citizens use NZ to places in Asia.
I'd think that that would be a not insignificant amount.

Lenovo

Shop now for Lenovo laptops and other devices (affiliate link).

hellonearthisman

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#352813 17-Jul-2010 21:07

Mauricio is right about the 100GB bandwidth fair use, it's a little low.
I get 100GB a month from my ISP and it cost under $50
With movies offered, then you would only be able to watch 10 before that cap was exceeded.
250GB - 500GB is more what is wanted.

Also, if you just reselling Telstra/Clear then why don't they provide a better level of internet today?

sounds a bit like this:

1080p

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#352814 17-Jul-2010 21:19

sbiddle: More isn't necessarily better.

The reality is the bulk of the internet traffic is generated from North America and Europe. Very little of what we're interestred in is hosted in Asia so I fail to see any great need for significant bandwidth to these countries. We need fatter pipes to destinations where we get our content from, not just pipes to random countries.

While they can be used as transit points it's crazy to route traffic from NZ to the USA via Singapore.

I disagree; redundancy is always good when it comes to bandwidth. If we have a link to the USA and one to Singapore/India/Taiwan/Japan and a natural disaster severs SxC somehow (think major earthquake/Tsunami on the US west coast) we'll still have a usable link to the world although it'd be slightly slower. If we had two links to the US then in that case we'd have nothing.

Having multiple links to the USA will increase our speed to the USA but we'll still have to transit for any Asian/European content which seems silly as there is a fair amount of content hosted in Europe. I can think of two major European hosting providers who could do with improved routing to New Zealand and Australia.

PenultimateHop

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#352816 17-Jul-2010 21:24

Impressive troll.

jtbthatsme

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#352820 17-Jul-2010 21:42

Well after reading through this and thinking about what the OP has suggested as a possible new offering into the (what i honestly believe is a currently pathetic offering in the) NZ market. I am surprised at your responses all (mostly) being so negative.

In fact I would even go as far as to say i am actually ashamed to see some of those responses. Here is someone (yes we don't know much about the OP and how genuine he is being not that he has any reason to not be) that is making a suggestion to go beyond anything available in NZ and what do you all do??? You pretty much all say he's crazy and it can't be done like he has said.

Reading through his initial post I would say that the OP has already done significant research about the possibility and cost to actually put this into effect. I am going to say even if he could offer half as good a service to what he is talking about offering I am all for it. Not only that but I think you have proved that you want all the benefits at basically all the cost on the provider and no cost to you.

Get real people NZ has a substandard service from monopolistic providers who in reality could offer a lot better than what they currently do and still make a good profit. NZ lacks decent speeds and lacks decent sized data plans.

I have been slammed on here before for saying that our main providers could offer more than what they currently do and make profit but if you seriously believe they can't then I share this site with some very narrowed minded people.

Mauricio please accept my apologies for anyone whom i offend here but I find a lot of these replies quite offensive to the OP.

As to the OP I commend you sir and if you think you can make a viable situation anything like what you have mentioned I wish you good luck and if you make it down to Wellington way I would gladly pay a relatively high priced initial ouytlay to get something this good.

Good Luck I hope this happens. NZ needs people like you to help move this country forward.

freitasm

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#352831 17-Jul-2010 22:45

I believe the providers could and should offer more than what they offer. I am personally not saying it can't be done - of course it can. But the realities in India and New Zealand are different.

While most of national traffic (about 70% - 80%) is mainly to/from AKL/WLG thanks to Trade Me and their dual data centre (which reverse roles every few months), international traffic is mainly coming from the US and Europe. I would invest a lot more in links to Australia and US than to India.

As for FTTH, there are a vast network of FTTN that Telecom has been deploying with their cabinetisation program, plus other optical city networks deployed by likes of Citylink, Vector and others.

The problem with FTTH is that list mile, and the way I see it, it will cost more in permits and roll out of those than stringing a cable over the ocean floor.

Now, I am mostly pointing problems, because I'd love to see the proposed solutions. That's all. In no moment I am saying it shouldn't be done. If you have the means, the connections, go for it.

jtbthatsme

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#352851 18-Jul-2010 00:18

Thanks Mauricio for understanding the meaning behind my rant.

I too feel if it can be done then we should embrace and encourage it.

I understand that a great deal of NZ traffic is from Europe and the USA but have to agree any new cables into NZ can only be a good thing. As earlier stated in a worst case scenario with only one cable into NZ we have the potential to be cut off should disaster strike and the link through the Southern Cross cable was unavailable.

I am just a personal user of the internet. I practically don't do any business online with exception to a tiny amount for my work and just as occassional use for online shopping (whether through Trademe or elsewhere. However i would like a part of my every day life was missing if i had no access to the internet hehe.

I find it encouraging to see that the OP feels that there is potential here to broaden what's on offer in the way he has described and although it may be a few years before it came into fruition it would be well be worth the wait.

Plus like one of the others pointed out this is something the govt is hoping to roll out and in fact for all we know the Non disclosure agreement the OP makes reference to could be the govt as they are looking at getting investors involved and who better than someone who actually sees a bigger briighter picture than what they were planning.

I am aware the last step is the expensive part but by making these offerings available the cost would start to come down and then we all get (the chance) to reap the benefits. Of course the install cost can always be built into your bill if the company wanted to tie people in for certain periods eg pay a extra $40pm for a year or whatever.

mgcarley

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#352857 18-Jul-2010 00:44

1080p: I am highly impressed with your ideas, you seem very organised and to have thought about this thoroughly. As for bringing international pipes into NZ I am very encouraged to hear this. I'd love to see a Singapore link developed and links from India/Taiwan sound good too. The more the better in my mind.

As for fibre to my place, I am extremely keen to acquire this! If you have the business plan I will be your customer.

I like what you mention about data plans for broadband. I find ISPs here are missing the larger sized plans (for more cash of course). I see no mid-range plans for 300-500GB offered anywhere.

There are a couple of 'unlimited' plans offered (Actrix & ThinAir) for ~$500 per month but I'm not sure exactly how 'unlimited' they are. I'd love to see a premium level of broadband data usage available to consumers here. I hope fibre will provide this and we'll be able to transition to larger and larger data limits.

I'm more-or-less adopting our Indian business plan to New Zealand (where India faces a similar predicament to NZ in many ways). There are, however, many more numbers to crunch - partially because of differing costs and partially because of topography and how the network has to work here.

In my mind I imagine an apartment block with 20 apartments in it, lying on its side... the reason for this is that operators in many countries (not just India) often keep their switches on the roof and run the cables down the stairwell or outside of the building to each premises.

I expect it may be easiest to provision access in a similar way, from a central point on each block, although this actually may mean that the switch is buried next to someones back fence which allows us to feed cables along a single line (eg the collective back-fence) to two rows of houses instead of creating a loop around the streets - sort of in a tree formation. Naturally, it all depends on what various councils and homeowners will allow.

As for data plans, more than willing to provide: the question is, at what cost? That all depends on what we can acquire from the wholesale providers - most ISPs charge at least $1 per GB, so currently you'd be looking at $500 for a 500GB plan, but in my mind this is unacceptable. I have it on good authority that American ISPs pay about 33% what NZ ISPs pay on a per-GB basis on the SxC. Why is that?

Do they buy more? Perhaps. But a 2.5Gbit/s line as minimum is not exactly small - I can buy access to SMW4 in increments of STM-1 (155Mbit/s) - a half-circuit cost something like US$200k per year per STM (which works out to $1m more over 5 years than the 2.5Gbit/s line on SxC). The difference being that my price for 2.5Gbit/s drops by over 50% to around US$90,000 per year per STM, coming out to just US$7.2m over 5 years.

When I started in India, our average cost per GB worked out to Rs12.5 per GB, or about NZ$0.38. We sell our 5mbit/s UL plan for about NZ$75, and after the local loop, overheads and our profit margin are taken in to account, it works out that we could afford about 115GB average per subscriber. Obviously some subscribers had to balance others out, but generally speaking it has worked.

The same principal could apply here - not everyone sits around leeching. If we made all intra-network traffic free, we would have even less to worry about because if we can prove to be as reliable as everyone else, a reasonable percentage of the file-sharing going on would eventually end up being (transparently) restricted to our network - hopefully due to customer shift. Not that this is the only reason to have such a feature, but if it mitigates the financial effects for us, we'd might as well.

Back on topic, Orcon seems to be the only one even close to providing "reasonably priced" plans for large volume users, with their offerings up to 200GB. Whether we can offer a significantly better price is a job for the spreadsheets and the accountants. If I got the numbers to work there (they're heavy on torrents there), surely I can get them to work here.

As for our own cables... they'll take a while to build. I'll be up in Asia by the end of the month solidifying plans - hopefully we'll get permission to land an India-Taiwan cable (which is mostly complete), which, if we built further, would allow us to effectively build a giant loop right around Australia. That would be cool, because buying bandwidth from and peering in Asia is very cheap and quite easy - and despite a small dogleg effect on traffic to the US, might give us good routes to Europe as well.

mgcarley

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#352858 18-Jul-2010 00:54

sbiddle:
More isn't necessarily better.

The reality is the bulk of the internet traffic is generated from North America and Europe. Very little of what we're interestred in is hosted in Asia so I fail to see any great need for significant bandwidth to these countries. We need fatter pipes to destinations where we get our content from, not just pipes to random countries.

While they can be used as transit points it's crazy to route traffic from NZ to the USA via Singapore.

More cables means more competition, which means SxC has to lower prices.

While you are right about North America and Europe being big sources for content, you might be surprised just how much we rely on Asian hubs for content and/or connectivity.

Singapore and Hong Kong are huge hubs for internet traffic tw and from both continents, with Singapore adding India and Japan to that mix. Going through these countries allows us huge amounts of access to the US by peering in these countries. Just because we would be buying traffic for NZ doesn't stop us from buying a 10GigE link from Singapore to the USA for significantly less money that we'd pay to go directly - but we have to have 10GigE from Singapore to NZ as well, and it's this part which is currently not really available and needs to be.

I don't see why you think it's crazy to route NZ-US traffic via Singapore. If I can buy traffic on an NZ-SIN-LAX route for 20% of what I would pay for the same on SxC, I would buy both and make the cheaper route the preferred route. The amount of latency increase would be negligible at worst - maybe 50ms which would then put our NZ-US pings on par with any ADSL user - and if I can buy a fatter pipe for that price than I could on SxC, the net benefit for our users would be generally increased speed - outweighing most of the cons.

Is there a real argument against doing that apart from "it's crazy"?

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