Key facts: New Zealand's International Cable Connectivity

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SteveON

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# 1015217 29-Mar-2014 22:20

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The main reason 10% of customers are on unbundled is because companies only install their own dslams on profitable areas. Also the whole cabnetisation that chorus has gone through has pretty much wiped out the economice of colocation.

NZ has a small population in a sparce area. It costs more to provide the same service here than most other countries. Just look at mobile, to service the same popularion in NZ they need to spend 2x the amount on infrastructure.

plambrechtsen

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# 1015246 29-Mar-2014 23:14

Sounddude:
NonprayingMantis:
and yet despite all major ISPs except telecom (50% market share) unbundling, there are still only 120k (less than 10% share) unbundled connections.

Your point?

Telecom are not allowed to unbunble. If they could, I bet you they would.

Cabinets are not viable to unbundle, as the regulated fibre backhaul are far from realistic. It would be much higher if it was realistic.

I'm fairly sure the LLU restraint on Telecom comes off at the end of this year.

But as many have already said. The cabinetisation project undertaken by Telecom that is now all Chorus gear means there is very little point. Incidentally this is now what our Australian friends are now doing with FTTN project once the new government shelved plans to build the FTTH aka NBN aka UFB project over there. So in a few years they may have the same network we had over here in 2008.

My personal bet if a new cable was built and they offered service at 10% the price that SCCN do then it may shave 5 dollars tops off your monthly bill. And that would be without a redundant loop so most ISPs would still buy capacity on SCCN albeit a lesser degree. So if there was an outage things would get interesting.

eXDee

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# 1015342 30-Mar-2014 12:23

Its fairly clear that the cost isn't really going to go down for the end user. The ISP might save itself a bit, but not much is really going to passed on cost wise by the look.

The question i'm more interested in is will competition in international bandwidth, increase the total bandwidth the ISP gets for the same amount of money? If so, this is going to result in better performance at peak times and/or higher data caps.

sbiddle

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# 1015344 30-Mar-2014 12:31

eXDee: Its fairly clear that the cost isn't really going to go down for the end user. The ISP might save itself a bit, but not much is really going to passed on cost wise by the look.

The question i'm more interested in is will competition in international bandwidth, increase the total bandwidth the ISP gets for the same amount of money? If so, this is going to result in better performance at peak times and/or higher data caps.

It may or it may not. That depends on what level of congestion may occur at handover points or on national transit/backhaul.

We're at a point now where the cost of carrying data around NZ isn't significantly cheaper than carrying it to the US.

webwat

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# 1015383 30-Mar-2014 13:53

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nigelj: Okay they are talking about upgrades in one small part of their statement, a network like that is always going to have upgrades and involve, the key point they are making is NZ<->US has far less use proportionally than AU<->NZ<->US and that for the NZ government to contribute large chunks of money to it's construction would subsidize traffic that goes through NZ or bypasses it (via alternative legs, which the NZ stop for redundancy).

Southern Cross seem to be the only ones so far in this thread that have remembered that Hawaiki are doing just that, it's an Australia to US cable, with a major spur to Whangarei and minor spurs to several PI nations, note that they aren't criticizing this as unviable, they are actually doing the complete opposite signaling that there is already significant work on an alternative.

Whatever is true or not with competition on the NZ-US route, there still needs to be both competition and diversity in the market.

Telecom is proposing an NZ-AU link that is subject to competition from other proposals, including the Kordia one, and the main point of the press release is to lobby government and/or opposition parties to let Telecom keep their virtual monopoly. Its a game Telecom has played for a long time so its not that easy to change a corporate culture that precipitates "obfuscation" press releases aimed at popular/political influence.

I reckon Pacific Fibre fell over because it planned to replicate the SX route from Sydney to US, not much advantage in that. A better option would have been a cable to Guam, which would give NZ diversity to US while also providing a more direct route to Asia. In comparison, Telecom/Vodafone's best idea is pretty much the minimum investment.

Qualified in business, certified in fibre, stuck in copper, have to keep going ^_^

Sideface

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# 1015385 30-Mar-2014 13:59

webwat: Whatever is true or not with competition on the NZ-US route, there still needs to be both competition and diversity in the market...

... the main point of the press release is to lobby government and/or opposition parties to let Telecom keep their virtual monopoly. Its a game Telecom has played for a long time so its not that easy to change a corporate culture that precipitates "obfuscation" press releases aimed at popular/political influence....

Yes! +1

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nigelj

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# 1015402 30-Mar-2014 14:14

webwat:
nigelj: Southern Cross seem to be the only ones so far in this thread that have remembered that Hawaiki are doing just that, it's an Australia to US cable, with a major spur to Whangarei and minor spurs to several PI nations, note that they aren't criticizing this as unviable, they are actually doing the complete opposite signaling that there is already significant work on an alternative.

Whatever is true or not with competition on the NZ-US route, there still needs to be both competition and diversity in the market.

Telecom is proposing an NZ-AU link that is subject to competition from other proposals, including the Kordia one, and the main point of the press release is to lobby government and/or opposition parties to let Telecom keep their virtual monopoly. Its a game Telecom has played for a long time so its not that easy to change a corporate culture that precipitates "obfuscation" press releases aimed at popular/political influence.

I reckon Pacific Fibre fell over because it planned to replicate the SX route from Sydney to US, not much advantage in that. A better option would have been a cable to Guam, which would give NZ diversity to US while also providing a more direct route to Asia. In comparison, Telecom/Vodafone's best idea is pretty much the minimum investment.

Right, but as I highlighted with the paragraph that I left quoted of my previous post, there is a new Pacific Fibre type operation, Hawaiki, the difference is, NZ (Whangarei in fact) is only a secondary landing point (as a spur, rather than a major part of a route (like with SX)), but it does have a key benefit over SX in that it has tertiary spurs to several PI nations that could do with better connectivity.

In context of SX's announcement and the timing of other announcements (*cough* Internet Party policies), I think it should simply be read as:

"A significant NZ Government subsidy on a new trans-Tasman/trans-Pacific cable project, is more of a subsidy for Australian users than New Zealand users"

It's NOT "We don't want competition"

Also for those quoting SX's ROI, remember the cable that goes through NZ is only half the picture, Southern Cross has a second cable that goes nowhere NEAR New Zealand.

(Other interesting things to note: Pacific Fibre, Aus<->NZ<->US: ~400m only US~170m presold capacity, Hawaiki, Aus<->US with spurs/connections to NZ, Hawaii, American Samoa, Other PI countries, ~420m, up to ~120m coming from US DoD alone, with unknown extra pre-sold to iiNet, TPG, Orcon)

webwat

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# 1015435 30-Mar-2014 16:25

Sounddude:
NonprayingMantis:]

It has?

Last I saw there were only just over 100k UCLL connections in the market, that's less than 10% of all connections.

Sure has. It allowed ISP's to sell Broadband at true cost, rather than Telecoms retail minus (which was the Wholesale pricing before unbundling).

It created compeition in the market and was the starting point for the Chorus/Telecom split.

Except that much of the network was subsequently cabinetised, handing chorus back its virtual monopoly for those users. At the scale of a single outside-plant cabinet theres no business case for unbundling. Thats why I would have liked to see UFB to have been planned with only central locations for splitters, ie home-run fibre. But apparently Chorus can hardly afford to do the project as it is...

Qualified in business, certified in fibre, stuck in copper, have to keep going ^_^

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