'Size' of Internet in NZ

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#417605 15-Dec-2010 13:30

This is a nice cartoon trying to estimate the global size of the internet/communication:

http://xkcd.com/802/

Could imagine the internet in NZ as a small island within it?

ojala

188 posts

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#417875 15-Dec-2010 23:00

PenultimateHop:

All sounds entirely valid to me. Sadly New Zealand is nowhere near those cost figures or bandwidth figures, and I wouldn't put it entirely down to data-caps (after all, Australia has data caps too and their traffic volumes are markedly different). Language definitely does have a contributing factor to domestic traffic exchange in my view, but inconsistently. India is an interesting but maybe invalid example here due to the subregional languages.

Immigrants are a valid point.

The more I think about the issue, the more I think it's a combination of everything. Not just chicken and egg but even if eggs are wanted, it won't happen because all the chicken are male. When and how everything happened, bandwidth, data caps, regulation, LLU, adsl2+, fast ge/10ge becoming commodity ...

For example here all the de-regulation and LLU happened pretty fast and before or during the biggest DSL boom. This gave all the carriers and newcomers the opportunity to benefit from the DSL demand and growth. Today, in a city you've got a choice of 3-6 DSLAM providers and all have the latest adsl2+ and plenty of bandwidth. In the rural areas one may have just one provider and that's where the regulator kicks in. The regulator keeps the game fare if a carrier is dominant in the region. In NZ the country is covered with TNZ DSLAM's and most people are connected, this gives very little incentive for any competitor to install their own equipment.

Even the data caps had an timing advantage. It was the incumbent that brought the first flat rate. Our, the commercial ISP's, cost structure depended how much international bandwidth was used. The incumbent had the money and they needed a competitive advantage, flat rates arrived - everyone had to follow. If that hadn't happened, the flat rates would have arrived years later like around other parts of Europe.

I think legacy is one of the biggest issues for NZ Internet. It even appears mentally, people talk about the UFB with "200G data caps" and talk about "life with huge data caps". The focus should be life without data caps and just T&C for the badly behaving folks. If there's no demand, no national capacity gets built. Do the grocery stores wait for 10 customers to buy milk, or put milk on the shelves for potential customers? People say that they don't need more than 50G a month, yes, maybe they didn't yesterday but do they really want to limit what they can do tomorrow?

From the figures on this thread I personally think NZ could move towards unmetered usage. Some bottlenecks here and there but the numbers aren't too bad, there needs to be the will to fix the bottlenecks instead of using them as excuses why it's not doable. Obviously it won't work by adding an unmetered product next to the metered ones but with a full change, like TNZ making Go & Explorer an unmetered 512 & 2 Mbit/s service and Adventure & Pro an unmetered, full-speed service. An exercise like Big Time will just attract all the bad boys and one can spend a lifetime adjusting all the traffic throttling.

Service quality is another topic that could last quite a few pints :D

I remember downloading things from nic.funet.fi mirrors back in the mid-90s. Takes me back to an entirely different era of shonky satellite connectivity and imuxed E1s.

Good to hear the service was found useful :)

insane

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#417913 16-Dec-2010 01:23

PenultimateHop:
wjw:
PenultimateHop: Edit to add: I'd love to be proven wrong on this, by the way.

I would love to prove you wrong, and from what I've seen you are, but due to commercial sensitivities I can't...

That's unfortunate, as I'd really love to know the real answer to this question, much like ojala does.

Much of the traffic for such services such as Orcon's Google cache and some other inter ISP peering is done via direct peering at the APE but not over APE fabric / using their route reflectors. We for example we have private connectivity to a few other providers where needed and I'd imagine other large content providers to do the same.

On an international stage though the amount of data transferred would be laughable for a peering exchange.

Ragnor

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#417917 16-Dec-2010 01:52

ojala:

like TNZ making Go & Explorer an unmetered 512 & 2 Mbit/s service and Adventure & Pro an unmetered, full-speed service. An exercise like Big Time will just attract all the bad boys and one can spend a lifetime adjusting all the traffic throttling.

Yes exactly, yet no one offering plans like this.

For all the ISP's reselling Telecom wholesale services our current situation is basically monopolistic profit maximisation via artificial scarcity (high unit price, low amount of units) due to inadequate and poorly targeted regulation.

Yet even worse the LLU providers Orcon, Vodafone, Slingshot, Callplus, Telstraclear who could offer these type of service via their own gear and own choice of backhaul provider.. well they aren't either.

Why did these ISP's fight so hard for LLU then the only innovation they could come up with is offer basically the same type of plans as what ISP's via Telecom wholesale provide just $10 cheaper... zzz

wjw

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#417931 16-Dec-2010 07:24

This graph includes direct peers over the switch fabric, but LINX is one of the biggest IX's:

Linx Traffic

Now I'm supporting a global network, getting into commercials globally highlights the huge costs in NZ for internet.

wjw

162 posts

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#417933 16-Dec-2010 07:33

Ragnor:
Why did these ISP's fight so hard for LLU then the only innovation they could come up with is offer basically the same type of plans as what ISP's via Telecom wholesale provide just $10 cheaper... zzz

When I got into this business many moons ago, I had to payback the equipment cost over 7 years, then it dropped back to 5, now it's 3.

I evaluated various DSLAM's in 2008 and you need a significant number of subscribers to cover the cost, I'm talking 100's off each DSLAM.

ojala

188 posts

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#417940 16-Dec-2010 08:13

wjw:

I evaluated various DSLAM's in 2008 and you need a significant number of subscribers to cover the cost, I'm talking 100's off each DSLAM.

This isn't comparable by any means (although I'm pretty sure there are ISP's here that run DSLAM's with less than 100's of subscribers) but years ago I would have preferred to be a customer of a specific ISP. They are the least telco-like, doing Annex M, bonding, VDSL2, static IP's, native IPv6, etc. At the time they didn't have a DSLAM in my local exchange and they said that if they'd get five customers they'd do it. I don't believe that 5 customers was the break-even point but that's where they put the limit, being a company without huge pockets.

Looking at the carrier price list for the local incumbent telco the local loop costs 9.40 €/month, the retail price for full-rate ADSL2+ is 29.90 €/month, 23% VAT included. That gives you less than 20 €/month to cover the DSL port, backhaul and everything else. Rack-space at the exchange isn't too expensive, a few subscribers will cover that. In the wholesale pricing the DSL port is about 10 €/month.

My guess is that the five customers in the above case would have covered most of the costs to be at the exchange (rack space, electricity) and they would have considered the DSLAM chassis and backhaul a long-term investment.

Anyway, I think the biggest problem is that it's much more difficult to fill a DSLAM today than it was e.g. 5+ years ago. I wouldn't start a DSL ISP here today and I doubt it would make much sense in NZ either, even in the current situation.

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wjw

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#417948 16-Dec-2010 09:02

ojala:
wjw:

I evaluated various DSLAM's in 2008 and you need a significant number of subscribers to cover the cost, I'm talking 100's off each DSLAM.

This isn't comparable by any means (although I'm pretty sure there are ISP's here that run DSLAM's with less than 100's of subscribers) but years ago I would have preferred to be a customer of a specific ISP. They are the least telco-like, doing Annex M, bonding, VDSL2, static IP's, native IPv6, etc. At the time they didn't have a DSLAM in my local exchange and they said that if they'd get five customers they'd do it. I don't believe that 5 customers was the break-even point but that's where they put the limit, being a company without huge pockets.

If you are that small you can just go buy a $1500NZD xDSL switch. I put one in for the Snow Farm down south a few years back, 12 port VDSL switch + 12 modems for 2K.

ojala

188 posts

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#418016 16-Dec-2010 10:43

wjw:

If you are that small you can just go buy a $1500NZD xDSL switch. I put one in for the Snow Farm down south a few years back, 12 port VDSL switch + 12 modems for 2K.

I just checked, they have about 10,000 DSL customers and use NSN gear for xDSL, DWDM/10GE/GE in the backhaul. Not big as such but still quite enough that require decent gear.

Data centres and web hosting is their core business, connect directly to Stockholm and London, contribute about 2-2.5 Gbit/s to the national IX (~10%). No idea what kind of private peering they do.

But even they have a problem -- the adsl2+ with the perks (IPv6, static IP) is twice as expensive as the adsl2+ from the big players.

Zeon

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#418037 16-Dec-2010 11:10

Has anyone read the specification on UFB about where the transmission equipment will sit and how many premises it will cover? If single mode is being used its conceivable that even with FTTN, the layer 1 service could just be patched back to a CO covering a massive area (like city size) which could give the economies of scale for smaller providers to deploy their own gear.

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DonGould

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#418042 16-Dec-2010 11:16

When you talk about 'small providers' what sort of player are you thinking about? How many staff? Size of co? How many customers?

I'm keen to get a fell about what people call small. I read talk about the point of this open access is to open up the door to small innovators.

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DonGould

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#418044 16-Dec-2010 11:19

http://weathermap.karen.net.nz/ is really interesting... I've been watching it and yet to see it hit orange anywhere... Wonder just how much unused capacity there is?

Would be nice if we could tap into that to feed it out the community when its not in use at the uni... what happens over summer when everyone's at home?

D

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

ojala

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#418052 16-Dec-2010 11:39

DonGould: http://weathermap.karen.net.nz/ is really interesting... I've been watching it and yet to see it hit orange anywhere... Wonder just how much unused capacity there is?

Would be nice if we could tap into that to feed it out the community when its not in use at the uni... what happens over summer when everyone's at home?

D

Do KAREN run caches and proxies? Looking at the weathermap the international traffic is relatively small (120M to Sydney, 70M to LA, both are 1G links) compared to the traffic in the national core. Healthy distribution of traffic anyway.

Do the students have free access? What about student residences?

ptinson

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#418125 16-Dec-2010 14:43

DonGould: http://weathermap.karen.net.nz/ is really interesting... I've been watching it and yet to see it hit orange anywhere... Wonder just how much unused capacity there is?

Would be nice if we could tap into that to feed it out the community when its not in use at the uni... what happens over summer when everyone's at home?

D

It used to be more interesting, when they kept an archive and you could watch a days traffic pattern in a matter of minutes play out before you.

OT: i use the weathermap for more than just network traffic. Examples include:

page load times from selected locations

mq message queue depths

mq message time on queue

soap request times

VPN client sessions

http requests/sec

dns requests/sec

If you can put it in an RRD you can more or less make a weathermap of it:)

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boby55

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#418132 16-Dec-2010 14:54

The size of the Internet, About a 20cm Cubed box :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

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