NZ to get unlimited broadband. When?

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amorangi

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#474682 27-May-2011 09:26

It frustrates me the media focus on UFB when no metion is made of data caps. Sure the rest of the world are switching to capped - but the caps are in the hundreds of GB, not the 5 - 25GB standard here. What's the point of UFB? - it only allows you to hit your monthly cap in 20 minutes instead of 200 minutes. I'd rather the money spent on UFB was spent on international links and breaking the Southern Cross monopoly. I'm quite happy with the 10Mb/s I get - it's fast enough to stream multiple staains of content at once. I'm not happy that it runs out so quickly!

Ragnor

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#474853 27-May-2011 15:39

We've been using the copper network for 50 years and we're getting near the limits of the medium.

A fibre optic network to every home, business, school is a once in an generation infrastructure upgrade.

It needs to be built for the same reasons utilities like the: power grid, railway, road system, water system were built.

International transit is already not a monopoly, SXC pricing is affected by competing cables in Australia eg: AJC and PIPE.

SXC pricing has been dropping year on year anyway

Also Pacific Fibre are progressing with their plan to build a new cable from NZ to the US.

webwat

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#475015 28-May-2011 00:42

amorangi: It frustrates me the media focus on UFB when no metion is made of data caps. Sure the rest of the world are switching to capped - but the caps are in the hundreds of GB, not the 5 - 25GB standard here. What's the point of UFB? - it only allows you to hit your monthly cap in 20 minutes instead of 200 minutes. I'd rather the money spent on UFB was spent on international links and breaking the Southern Cross monopoly. I'm quite happy with the 10Mb/s I get - it's fast enough to stream multiple staains of content at once. I'm not happy that it runs out so quickly!

Short term problem. You should still have a budget 10Mbit/s option on UFB, and the bigger cities will take longer to build than the proposed international cables. By the time UFB is built out to the suburbs you will have lots more bandwidth on Pacific Fibre, and possibly a Kordia link to Oz if you're lucky. One of the issues with UFB is that it completely changes the local environment. Fingers crossed, but watch out for a more transparent backhaul market, cheaper and more efficient data centres, more locally hosted networking applications, and peering exchanges keep getting bigger and faster.

I would say its the ideal environment to support cloud computing and real-time business continuity systems that are currently expensive to get across-town bandwidth for. There seems to be several new data centres being built int Ozzy, and that might happen here too.

Time to find a new industry!

webup

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#475583 29-May-2011 21:20

freitasm: The trend around the world is to move away from "unlimited". Canada's gone that way, and in the US the cable companies, and now Verizon, have gone that way.

New Zealand has been on the "cap" side of broadband for years. I don't think the local telcos will move to "unlimited" now or ever again.

Any "unlimited" you see around are either very expensive for consumer, or heavily managed.

For years we used Bulldog DSL in the UK which in fineprint had a fair usage policy but they never enforced it at all and some months would download 60+ Gb and this is back maybe 5 years ago.

It cost 40 pound per month.

tdgeek

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#475595 29-May-2011 22:04

---What's the point of UFB? - it only allows you to hit your monthly cap in 20 minutes instead of 200 minutes.---

This mistaken illusion was on TV tonight as Sam Morgan stated that having a much faster connection will use up the data cap so quick. That makes no sense at all, and is a pet peeve of mine. This is the media confusing the general public who are not broadband aware. It is misleading.

Ragnor

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#475622 30-May-2011 02:30

Habits won't change overnight but there is the potential to use up small caps quite quickly.

Many video streaming services tailor the rate to what speed you are getting to their server more data will be used because it's possible for you to accept higher bitrate video smoothly.

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michaeln

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#475770 30-May-2011 14:28

webup:
freitasm: The trend around the world is to move away from "unlimited". Canada's gone that way, and in the US the cable companies, and now Verizon, have gone that way.

New Zealand has been on the "cap" side of broadband for years. I don't think the local telcos will move to "unlimited" now or ever again.

Any "unlimited" you see around are either very expensive for consumer, or heavily managed.

For years we used Bulldog DSL in the UK which in fineprint had a fair usage policy but they never enforced it at all and some months would download 60+ Gb and this is back maybe 5 years ago.

It cost 40 pound per month.

That would be Bulldog which is now part of TalkTalk. 'Essentials' package gets you a 40GB cap and 'Plus' gets you 'unlimited' downloads, both subject to fine print which say they'll shape your torrents (etc.) and upgrade you or terminate you if they think your usage is excessive. What this means in practice I don't know, but it is explicit that your volume is measured and that traffic is shaped.

ojala

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#478395 6-Jun-2011 23:38

I certainly hope that New Zealand will get unlimited broadband. Rather sooner than later as it has such a big impact on the local ICT industry (or lack of it) and how both commercial and public Internet services get built nationally.

The world is most definetly not going towards capped internet. Sometimes (Canada..) wrong decisions are being made. The most common alternative to the free, unlimited broadband is T&C's that will limit misuse. A cap that is high enough to cover 99% of the users, or a cap that will drop the speed down to crawling.

I'm afraid UFB is not going to be such a great success unless the caps start from 500+ GB by then and do not include domestic traffic.

If one looks at the fiber offerings being built around Europe today, they don't introduce caps but offer a variety of services. From plain high-speed 100M broadband to bundles that include mobile voice, mobile broadband, fixed voice, TV, HDTV, pay-TV, PVR services, surveillance/security services, etc. Just like in the historical era the copper line worked for voice, fax and dialup internet, the fiber will offer similar choice of services.

The carriers are not afraid to offer e.g. video over the fiber (or even xDSL). They look forward for tomorrow instead of trying to stick to what was the de-facto state yesterday. I believe that's the biggest problem internet/mobile in NZ has today.

PS. Being even more serious, we're actually re-thinking our plan to move to NZ and one of the reasons is that I see too much people trying to say that "20GB data caps are fine and rest of the world will go that way too" than "ok, what do we do to get rid of the datacaps?". Even Telecom and the other carriers should work towards such a state. We don't have UFB here but we have a dozen carriers installing fiber to the homes and buildings every day.

eXDee

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#478411 7-Jun-2011 01:19

Once UFB rolls out, affordable unlimited without aggressive shaping will apparently be possible, source is nowhere near concrete (try jelly perhaps), but it gives me a bit of hope.

Ragnor

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#478532 7-Jun-2011 13:25

Just not economically possible until we have better national peering (will probably require regulation to force Telecom and Telstraclear to participate) and more submarine cables to the US/world.

I haven't seen anything about domestic peering from CrownFibre yet...

Pacific Fibre looks like it is progressing ok though.

Beccara

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#478547 7-Jun-2011 13:50

You wont see anything about domestic peering out of CFH, It's waaay outside the scope of the UFB

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