How to make NZ internet better, cheaper and with bigger caps.

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › How to make NZ internet better, cheaper and with bigger caps.

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3892 posts

Uber Geek

#530687 7-Oct-2011 18:32

riahon: I think I will pass. Your logic may be well thought out but I liken this to the email that went out about boycotting specific petrol companies to force them to reduce prices. I deleted that email.

Ya, boycotting oil companies is silly. Oil is very different to the internet. With oil you just have to stop using it if you want the price to go down.

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

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#531037 8-Oct-2011 22:01

14. Buy a better computer.

Until recently my mum was running a computer with a whopping 35gb hard disk in it. That gives you some clue about the vintage.

The impact was that her web browsing was slow. So even though we'd just installed an internet connection that was 4 to 6 times faster, than what they had, here usage experience was still poor.

This poor experience, of course, lead her to using the net for less things, which in turn means she was using less data (and I've already covered how important it is to have our parents using data).

So, upgrade her computer, she can now skype better, we've also installed a number of other bandwidth hungry applications, so she's now making more use of the net and doing more of her share of pushing demand for better performance and capacity.

15. Fix your mates place.

No way those less computer, internet, network literate friends of yours are going to do their bit to push the demand curve if their set ups aren't doing it!

Is there house wiring sorted out or is their 504 ADSL1 modem still only pulling 1.5mbits and they had no idea?

You can be sure that every geek working at Disk Smith wants a faster connection at home and the way that happens is if they earn more money. Fortunately for you, DSE also do 2 week return policy thing... so get down there, grab a new ADSL2+ modem, drop it on your mates connection, after you sort out his house wiring with him and show him a speed test comparison.

Show your mate by just spending $250 dollars he can get up to 10 times the speed out of his connection.... speed that he's already paying for, but not getting just for the sake of a decent modem!

16. Help the monitoring guys - TrueNet

There is no one batter harder to get you better service than the guys monitoring the networks.

Having collected data using your connections, they then want to figure out creative ways to make a buck by selling that information to providers so they can figure out creative ways to be seen to be better than their competitors.

If a provider sees their sox are down then they'll go off and figure out how to pull those sox up.

It's a very simple trickle down thing that starts with you giving the monitoring companies your support.

17. Understand the economic benefit of the internet for our children or your future.

"because it's cool" and "cause my kids can learn stuff" aren't two tangible economic benefits.

'we have to keep up and keep in stride or we simply become to expensive or irrelevant'.

Searching - If your internet connection is slow and mine is fast then I will find more information faster than you will and there is every chance I'll also find stuff you won't. For example, if the best information to be had on a subject is on page 3 of your search results, but your connection is slow, there's a chance you won't even bother clicking though pages to page 3, so you'll never see the link that has the information that I am able to benefit from.

The impact of this on you is that information might be the key to my putting a better presentation to the client and wining the business, even if my price is higher - not everyone buys the cheapest option.

Search Promotion - three pages of search results is three pages of search ads. This means more opportunities for those advertises to put their offering in front of the viewer. Ads aren't always about making an instant sale. Often they're about educating users, awareness. The less aware we are about products and services the more irrelevant we are than people who are more aware.

Online Video - Ok so I just got a new widget from an online store but I can't quite figure how to put it together. I have some choices... return the widget (ok, that's not very productive), ring up the seller and hope they can talk me though the process of putting it together, hire someone to put it together, spend more time and nut it out or sit down and watch a video that demonstrates how to do it.

The online video option is the best choice clearly because it saves you the most time and keeps the cost of sales to the lowest point for your seller.

If your competitor is based in Australia, has a 1tb data cap on his internet connection for $100 then he can afford to upload 3 gigs of video about every product he manufactures. He can do 300 products a month of high quality video.

If our cost is sales in New Zealand is higher than our counter parts in the same region or our competitors markets then they simply have an advantage over us.

18. Stop using carriers!

Yes I know I said this yesterday.... but it's really really important!

You can see the number of blue choices and the number of yellow providers.

If one provider is servicing 50% of the customers then is stands to reason that they can simply get much better prices than everyone else. But they will also sell to the market at the price that it will bare. What's worse, for you as a consumer, is that they will sell at a higher price so they don't get told off all the time by the ComCom for under cutting past what competitors can sell for (because those competitors can't get the same buy price that the biggest guys can because they simply don't have enough customers).

So if you want better prices from anyone then you have to give the small guys more business so they can get better deals from the Orange guys and so that the big guys in turn can drop prices to everyone else (not that they should have any customers other than blue guys by my logic :) ).

19. Stop using the PSTN!!!

Yes, yes, yes.... I know I also said this yesterday but New Zealanders just aren't getting the message!

You really do have to get busy and convince every person you know not to use the PSTN any more.

A business that has 4 copper phone lines, 3 for the pabx and 1 for the fax only needs one copper pair running into the building, not 4. VDSL means they can run as many phone lines as they need and have fast internet.

Copper is expensive to keep running. It breaks down from time to time, so the less bits that Telecom has to look after the better.

If you free up 3 pairs from your business then Telecom can have those back to use as spares rather than having to fix broken connections all the time. Think of this in terms of a garage just doing a 'swapper tire' when you roll in with your flat one. At the end of the month, when they have 300 flat tires, they then fix the whole lot in one hit, it's quicker and cheaper to do. This means they can either have a higher profit or pass some savings on to you - either is good!

You can move!

VoIP is about more than just not using as much copper. It's also about your ability to move without notice.

Many people don't get married these days because they feel that by not being tired down to a fixed contract that their relationship is more solid because they have to work on their partnership more than someone who is married.

Now I don't know if you subscribe to that logic, but it does apply to the technology world. If you provider knows they can loose hold of you in a heart beat then they'll be more keen to work for you to keep you by bringing you more value.

VoIP means that you're not tied to your fixed line provider. I can move my VoIP "fixed line number" from my fixed line service to my mobile service in an instant. This means I don't loose service while I change fixed line providers.

This means I can jump ship to a different provider in a heart beat if they come up with a sweeter deal. This in turn means I can keep my costs heading down and stay competitive with my competition.

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

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#536666 23-Oct-2011 11:09

20. Buy a .nz domain name (I have 20 of them).

No only should you buy your own .nz domain name but you should also host it in New Zealand. You need to give our providers something to export.

Put some of your own content on it. Don't just donate all your hard work to Google/YouTube to use to generate advertising revenue from while you pay for your nets.

Create content under the .nz TLD that tells the world New Zealand exists and makes people want to visit our web sites and then our country. (I'm sure most of you can connect the dots from there...)

21. Set up a web site, don't use Facebook, use your own blog.

Facebook is one of the coolest things in the digital space. You can update it from your mobile phone while sitting on a bus with photos. You can push video at YouTube while on the same bus...

...however as I said above, this really is giving away our content to foreign companies to store on servers over seas so that we will then pay (again) to get it back to see it.

Get your content on to your own web sites. If your ISP gives you some locally hosted space on their server then use it.

The less content we push/pull to .us/.au, the more space we free up to pull content that is actually made and only hosted in those domains.

22. Use New Zealand owned and operated sites.

If you can get your content locally then do so! Again, the less New Zealand stuff up pull from .us and .au the more space you free up to get better performance for the stuff that really does have to come from off shore.

23. Stop hosting your web sites in the USA.

Ok, if your readers are all over the globe and the balance of your traffic is not from New Zealand then, yes, host it in .us. It's in the middle of everywhere net and for .uk/.eu users .nz is bonkers.

However, if your target market is New Zealand then put your web site on .nz servers. You might think... 'oh but this saves me $10 a month!'... but it's costing us all more than that each month just to pull all your traffic back from .us!

US hosting might be cheaper on your just for hosting, but it's doing nothing to drive down your/our connection costs and gives us nothing in New Zealand to export in terms of data.

Finally on this note, check your hosting logs and understand who your viewers are and block out the rubbish.

On reviewing my web site logs I find an insane amount of traffic going to search engines and marketing companies scraping my sites with no value to myself, my customers or my country.

24. Stop using your ISPs email address!!!

With a .nz domain name you CAN have your own you@yourdomain.co.nz email addresses.

Stop doing this on your business card!!!....

SuperCool Co Ltd
www.geekzone.co.nz
geekzone@randomISP.co.nz

Cool, you have your own web site, but you've just tied yourself in to your ISP for life, what's more you're promoting their business every time you attempt to promote your own.

If you have your own email addresses on your own domain you can move from provider to provider. What's more, domain names can also be moved from one provider to another if you find a better deal to buy them. I currently sell domain names for less than $3 a month and I'm not the cheapest!!!

Gmail, Hotmail, there are an endless number of mail hosting solutions if you want something free that don't leave you tied to your ISP.

Move your grandmother off that isp address!

25. Make some Geekzone stickers and stick them to friends computers.

Public forums are a fantastic source of help for everyone. Make sure all your friends know about this and other resources.

I often have people who find the answers to a problem on line but don't know quite what it means and how to apply the advice. So don't think that you're giving away your existing for living.

Share the love of support web sites with everyone.

A stick plonked on someones keyboard or monitor could be saving them a headache...

In my view, you don't need to even make a flash roll of stickers... hand writing the url on a QuikStik MR 19-63 removable label could make someones day!

(Can you tell I just happen to have a box of those stickers on my desk ;) )

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

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#537977 26-Oct-2011 22:18

26. Get your work using more internet access - get them to stop using the PSTN!

When your business runs a promotion do they set up an 'event web site'?

Are they putting product information in a video and on YouTube for customers?

Do they run a daily blog of things of interest to your customers?

Are they still using PSTN telephone lines?

Are they doing remote off site back ups? (Just ask a business that was in the Christchurch CBD just how important that is!)

27. Set up a residents accociation web site... and every club you can think of.

Every day you need to create more reasons for more people to make more use of the internet.

28. Make content and put it on the internet every single day. Find ways to get more content on the internet every day.

You have a video camera in your mobile phone. Use it!

The more content you push on to the internet the more demand for capacity you drive.

Become a historian and record history. What you write, photograph or video doesn't have to be interesting today.

You never know when historic information will be interesting in the future.

Today you need to set the stage for our success in the future.

29. Use TVNZ and TV3 On demand

TVNZ and TV3 are our major content produces. Use them! The more you use them, the more funding they will get to improve them. The more capacity you pull from those local networks the more capacity the network in turn has to have. So do what you can to use that content to drive more network capacity.

30. Use your free sites as much as you can.

Free sites still cause the use of network capacity. While most free sites aren't coming from overseas servers, we do still have a bottle neck in the local network and the more traffic we push over it the more justification there is to upgrade that network.

31. Share with the world - blog it, become a content producer

Hey, right now you're reading my thoughts. According to the GZ stats, more than 1,400 hits on this page so far. Don't be selfish and just read my content, inspire me with yours. You are an interesting person, everyone is in their own way. What we don't know is who else might be interested in what we have to say until put put it out there.... so get busy! Put yourself on the internet every day.

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

jonb

1771 posts

Uber Geek

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#538183 27-Oct-2011 15:04

#28 and #31 - creating content..

How about lobbying and tax breaks for a google or facebook style data centre in New Zealand, I think that would a much big effect getting traffic coming to New Zealand in one hit, maybe the SE Asian hub for them?

Give them similar electricity pricing as we give the Bluff smelter?

Facebook are building a new 2 hectare data centre in Northern Sweden, and the same arguments for building it there -renewable energy and cooler climate - can be applied to here. Especially with at least one more trans-tasman cable being built shortly.

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#539151 29-Oct-2011 23:52

32. Bring it home - host here, create something for me to sell for you!

I'm sure I've said this one already, but it's so important, so obvious, yet we still host so much stuff in dumb places. I looked at a web site just the other day for a company 10 minutes up the road, hosted in India. Great! It took so long to download the front page I looked for a competitor.

People often quack on here about peering being important, but it's really not as important as hosting in New Zealand. If all the content is overseas then every ISP just wants bigger pipes to .us.

If you had all your content on my web hosting servers then Telecom and Telstra would be more inclined to want to peer with me rather than charge me for a connection to their networks.

But as it currently stands, way to many of you are hosting content over seas and or in Telstra and Telecom data centers meaning that there's no incentive for them to peer with the smaller providers.

33. Upgrade your modem/router/networking gear

So many people are still using crappy old ADSL1 speed modems or really crappy ADSL2 modems that won't even take advantage of the speeds that the current network will do.

The problem is that Telecom would argue there's not point in upgrading backhaul links when the end customers can't even pull the extra capacity.

The ISPs argue that if Telecom would update the backhaul then they'll sell the customers new modems...

See how this a catch 22?

Go round to ya mum's place and throw out that old modem and shout her a new one! At least then she has half a chance of pulling some data off her cap when she does sit down to use her machine.

What's worse is crappy wifi in homes!

As a web dev, I'm constantly tuning sites to chop back bandwidth just because the end users can't pull images of any size because even though they have ADSL2+ their wifi is so poor that it's chugging back to 1 or 2 mbit.

If that switch that connects segments of your network together is 10mbit then there's no chance it will be moving a fraction of that. Upgrade it!

If you're still using the same router with Telstra cable that you got 10 years ago, then chances are that it's a bottle neck because when you signed up they were only doing slower plans than they do today.

34. Figure out what's using your data and stop using p2p/skype.

If you can make your p2p and or skype limit its random connections to New Zealand then cool, but if you're uploading to random hosts all over the planet then we're not using the net efficiently.

Ideally with p2p traffic, we'd pull the content from where ever once and then share it around locally so we lessen the demand on the international links so we can free it up for more stuff, not the same stuff bouncing back and forth 10 times.

35. Use SIP and start to use SIP video.

Some bright sparks made all these cool protocols, but most of us never get round to using half of them until someone puts them in a pretty package for us... well skype is not the only video tool out there and it's far from the best quality, though I will agree it's really cool and so simple to use!

We need to stop putting voice on copper and make more use of video locally. Figure out how you can be part of that!

36. Give people tablets - use them as photo frames, set them up so you can dump content on them with drop box or something.

Laptops are cool... and I confess I'm typing this on my desktop tonight. I love my big screen... but we need to make data easier to consume for people who are not drinking their share currently and tablets do seem to be gaining traction in that space.

Help people figure out how they can make more use of them. If they have a tablet sitting on a desk, get them a stand so they can have it sitting up enough to be a photo frame when it's sitting idle.

Set the thing up to display random photos that you take... push content to them... figure it out, but make them consumers.

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

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#539152 29-Oct-2011 23:57

jonb: #28 and #31 - creating content..

How about lobbying and tax breaks for a google or facebook style data centre in New Zealand, I think that would a much big effect getting traffic coming to New Zealand in one hit, maybe the SE Asian hub for them?

Give them similar electricity pricing as we give the Bluff smelter?

Facebook are building a new 2 hectare data centre in Northern Sweden, and the same arguments for building it there -renewable energy and cooler climate - can be applied to here. Especially with at least one more trans-tasman cable being built shortly.

We could spend all day shouting at the rain for a tax break. Currently I'm still waiting for the minsters office to get back to me on my last question which was a simple one and didn't involve something as political as a tax break.

I don't know about facebook, but Google is already here. They have caches here already. Though there does seem to be some bitch slapping between some providers with Telstra customers coming off second best recently with traffic heading to the Queen before it got to my desk.

I agree with you though... we do need to focus on the .au market and build hosting here because we can power it and cool it cheaper than they can.... I'm already all over that and working on my own products in that space and I know I'm not the only one by far!

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

Sharesies

Trade NZ and US shares and funds with Sharesies (affiliate link).

insane

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#539166 30-Oct-2011 01:12

Yup, please follow Don's advise, ISPs love selling you data (up to a point), it's once of the only areas an ISP can make some margin so go hard! The oil company analogy wasn't so far off after all, they also love selling their product.

The reason we're slowly seeing larger data caps now being implemented is nearly solely down to increased caching of international content and the removal of the handover limits previously imposed on ISPs. The price of international bandwidth does have some part to play, but honestly not as much as you'd think.

ojala

188 posts

Master Geek

#540147 2-Nov-2011 00:50

jonb: #28 and #31 - creating content..

How about lobbying and tax breaks for a google or facebook style data centre in New Zealand, I think that would a much big effect getting traffic coming to New Zealand in one hit, maybe the SE Asian hub for them?

Give them similar electricity pricing as we give the Bluff smelter?

Facebook are building a new 2 hectare data centre in Northern Sweden, and the same arguments for building it there -renewable energy and cooler climate - can be applied to here. Especially with at least one more trans-tasman cable being built shortly.

Exactly! Google has two data centers outside of the US; one in Belgium next to a river, and one in Finland using cool seawater for cooling -- making it one of the most advanced and efficient Google data centers. Sweden, Belgium and Finland are all small countries and with the exception of Belgium, not exactly in the centre of everything.

Our local CSC IT Center for Science is moving their data center from the capital to a small town in the middle of nowehere. http://www.csc.fi/english/datacenter
Water cooling from a local river, three hydropower stations on-site (!), next to a 80 MW bio-energy plant. The plan is to be one of the most eco-efficient DC's in the world.

Get "enough" data capacity to Australia and attract their data centers to NZ!

PS. NZ needs to stop comparing oneself to .au. Like Nike says, "just do it", and eventually the australians will be comparing to NZ.

vespaman

88 posts

Master Geek

#542050 7-Nov-2011 14:47

Don Gould you make for interesting reading. So much of your article is right on the money. I was looking for some VDSL information and came across your article. how do manage to sell domain names so cheaply ?

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#542167 7-Nov-2011 18:48

vespaman: Don Gould you make for interesting reading. So much of your article is right on the money. I was looking for some VDSL information and came across your article. how do manage to sell domain names so cheaply ?

Thanks for a nice vote of support.

Personally I hope lots of people take the time to read it and think. Mine is just one view.

I love technology and personally I love to get to use every little feature that the designers build in to systems.

Two decades of interest in the area and a passion for seeing consumers get more value, I don't always feel I contribute to that as much as I'd like.

But I hope these words can inspire some ideas to bring New Zealand up there with the leading countries around the world.

Not sure what you meant by selling domain names cheap. New Zealand domain names are still double the price of other countries. My .info domain, for example cost me $3 to register for a whole year and less than half my .nz domain name this year. So we still have a long long way to go.

If you were talking about hosting... no magic trick there either. I don't provide a BMW offering, I provide a basic entry level offering. I use free open source software (which means I have no licensing costs), I work with a community of like minded guys (which means I don't pay huge 'vendor' costs for complex issues that are beyond my ability to fix), I use 'simple, low cost, off the shelf hardware' (which might not have a service life of 10 years, but give the performance demand curve growth, is just pointless anyway for a small operator), I keep my costs down (so sorry if you happen to work for a marketing company, there isn't really budget for TV ads) and I accept that my own income isn't 6 figures for what I do.

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

lucky015

743 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#542316 8-Nov-2011 00:06

Have to say I don't find it likely that we will get far in industries such as these until we put a stop to our national attitude of trying to limit usage rather than allowing it to increase naturally while increasing backbone services to support it.

The claims made by ISP's are along the lines of: High prices are due to lack of competition but lack of competition is due to lack of required capacity which is being caused by the high prices that are only in place because of the lack of competition in the first place!

Circular Logic.

Australia has had the same/similar limitations and hurdles as we have yet have come out better off which I believe is largely because of their overall bulk approach rather than the minimalist one here.

Had we allowed our usage to grow naturally (As it should because of our Geographical Position, We should have extraordinarily HIGH usage, Not LOW) we would have higher or even unlimited plans as the norm along with having infrastructure upgrades being done long ago because they where actually feasible due to competition.

SCX should be being being forced to up their capacity and lower prices because of competition, Not being allowed to sit back and relax with high prices and mediocre capacity.

Ragnor

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#542325 8-Nov-2011 01:12

lucky015:

SCX should be being being forced to up their capacity and lower prices because of competition, Not being allowed to sit back and relax with high prices and mediocre capacity.

You realise that SXC has doubled capacity and halved pricing per Mbit every 2 years.. year on year

Also pricing for NZ and AU is the same, there are multiple other cables in AU (AJC, PIPE etc) so we are already benefiting from somewhat competitive pricing.

There is nothing stopping someone else building additional cables from NZ.. apart from finance and a viable business case.

Also international costs are just one part of the cause of high prices and metered bandwidth, domestic transit is expensive also and wholesale access costs for use of the lines, backhual etc are expensive too.

lucky015

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#542328 8-Nov-2011 01:24

Ragnor:
lucky015:

SCX should be being being forced to up their capacity and lower prices because of competition, Not being allowed to sit back and relax with high prices and mediocre capacity.

You realise that SXC has doubled capacity and halved pricing per Mbit every 2 years.. year on year

Also pricing for NZ and AU is the same, there are multiple other cables in AU (AJC, PIPE etc) so we are already benefiting from somewhat competitive pricing.

There is nothing stopping someone else building additional cables from NZ.. apart from finance and a viable business case.

Also international costs are just one part of the cause of high prices and metered bandwidth, domestic transit is expensive also and wholesale access costs for use of the lines, backhual etc are expensive too.

It would still be nice to see their hand forced rather than them just doing the bare minimum of what is expected of them combined with a little pushing from the other Australian competition.

Also the capacity of their cable is generally shown as overall not path specific if I have read things correctly?

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#542768 8-Nov-2011 19:20

lucky015: SCX should be being being forced to up their capacity and lower prices because of competition,

I totally agree. SCX needs competition on the .au route as a priority.

The current problem is (and this is ironic), how does a second cable deliver capacity to the .nz consumer?

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

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