I'm trying to understand which ISPs consistently offer the best international bandwidth at NZ peak times (6-10pm).  My research so far has led me to the following conclusions:

• TrueNet doesn't seem to focus on international bandwidth (although they do occasionally report on it).  They do show very interesting info regarding throughput at peak times, however.
• There are a number of topics here on Geekzone, but they tend to focus on specific events (or specific dates/times) when international bandwidth is an issue for a given ISP
• There doesn't seem to be any regional basis to the discussions - i.e. Auckland vs Wellington vs Chch, etc
• ISP policy tends to change.  e.g. Slingshot seem to let things go un-altered until enough people complain about it.
• Naturally, people don't tend to comment when things are good
• Right now (May 2013) it seems Snap and Telecom are touted as being the best options for someone in Auckland.  What about Wellington or Christchurch?
• Is it really true that the big players (Telecom, TCL, Vodafone) consistently have the most international bandwidth per customer?
• If I switched to a VDSL or Fibre plan, would I get more international bandwidth, at least initially?  i.e. are customers on those plans allocated to a separate, less contested international bandwidth pool?
• You get what you pay for.  I currently pay ~$100 for capped broadband (250MB) + home line.  From Slingshot (sorry, PeterReader)
• The services I'm talking about are not technically available in NZ, so obviously NZ ISPs are not content caching or doing other clever things like that.  Unblock-US claim that if your international bandwidth is high enough, however, (6 min, better 8-10 Mbps) then you should be able to get Super HD on Netflix through them (i.e. they lock you in to the "favoured" group of US based ISPs that work well with Netflix.

What I'm really interested in knowing is this: is it worth switching to a specific ISP if I live in Auckland and my main goal is good, reliable, HD quality streaming from Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Amazon?  Is there something else I can be doing?

It there even a clear answer?  Or would I have to switch frequently between ISPs depending on who's got the most available bandwidth at a given point in time?  That probably wouldn't work, due to contracts and early termination fees - but that's another topic altogether.


Right now, I get 3, 4 maybe 5 Mbps down from west coast USA (San Francisco, LA, etc) on speedtest.net using unblock-us.  I get the same (maybe a little slower) using HMA VPN.  This means I normally can watch most things without buffering, but at a quality level between average and good SD.  Maybe this is just the best I'm going to get?

Note that my ADSL 2+ connection has been troubleshot, and is fine.  I get 16,000 Kbps down and 1200 up, and my home wiring is a beautiful thing to behold.  I don't have a master splitter as I don't really think I need one.  So go away, PeterReader.


To be honest, I'm fine with what I'm getting now.  I'd just extremely curious to know if I can get any more bank for my buck...