Why no unlimited broadband packages in New Zealand?

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Screeb

698 posts

Ultimate Geek

#235186 14-Jul-2009 15:07

NonprayingMantis:
I can get a theoretical 24Mb/s plan in NZ for $30NZD if cabinitised and 8Mb/s if not cabinitised. Hence they are not comparable to the Moscow plan on price or speed.

Essentially what you have is a trade off between speed, price and data cap. The Moscow plan gives you data and the exepnse of price and speed.

The "theoretical 24Mb/s plan in NZ for $30NZD" is NOT the other side of the coin to an unlimited plan like the ones in Moscow. That plan has a 500MB cap, which makes the speed useless. Oh, and it's 128kbps up, meaning you won't get anything near 24Mbps.

SepticSceptic

2177 posts

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#235735 15-Jul-2009 16:41

jpollock:

My reading of the NZ Copyright law is that it is 100% legal, albeit untested in court:

http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2008/0027/22.0/viewpdf.aspx
page 48:

    for the avoidance of doubt, does not include a process,
    treatment, mechanism, device, or system to the extent
    that, in the normal course of operation, it only controls
    any access to a work for noninfringing
    purposes (for example, it does not include a process, treatment,
    mechanism, device, or system to the extent that it controls
    geographic market segmentation by preventing the
    playback in New Zealand of a noninfringing
    copy of a work)

New Zealand Copyright law has an EXPLICIT exemption that allows New Zealand residents to do anything that they want to get around region locks. Hulu is legally offering their content to US IP Addresses, and I have a US IP Address. it's no more illegal than a Region Free DVD player - which is 100% legal in New Zealand.

I'm seriously considering writing in a submission to the Copyright Review - Section 92A Review Policy, and working in this little gem, to the effect that regional locks are currently forcing NZ internet users to become pirates in order to obtain TV series and movies that are available to download in the USA only.

This applies to both relatively recent releases, all the way down to the long-tail's where the TV series has already been screened a few times over the intervening years, ad revenue garnered, and now I want to plug a few holes in my collection, or replace purchased VHS movies with the digital equivalent.

A bit more reading of the appropriate acts, a few more coffees, and I might have something coherent to submit :-)

NonprayingMantis

6434 posts

Uber Geek

#235912 16-Jul-2009 00:19

kobiak: NonprayingMantis, huh... have you even followed the link?

10mbit both ways for 31NZD, 30mbit both ways for 62NZD in Moscow is common (and these are unlimied) for the same price you could have caps of 22gb and 44gb (for 45NZD) respectively on 100mbit both ways.

2-4mbits both ways for 50NZD was a statement about country in general (urban area I would say)...

and I know yes, this is not fully what you wanted of 75%+ of all country population. BUT for a given city it works like a charm :D

I was going by your post which said "unlimited 2-4mbit for 40-50NZD"

google translate takes ages to load for me so I didn't bother. Having loaded it now I see you are correct with 10Mb/s for $30. Why did you quote incorect figures initially that contradicted the point of your post?
Assuming fo course that it isn't just an error in Google Translate and the prices are way higher.

I'll grant you the speed and datacap (and I'm pretty impressed with those plans tbh - way better than anything I've seen in the USA and Europe), but the population argument is still silly.
The stipulation of 'to 75% of the population' is presumably (I didn't set the challenge in the first place, so can;t read minds) to give an approximately equivalent coverage of urban and rural people to the NZ demographic. Since we know it is vastly more expensive to service rural customers than urban to compare nationally available plans to 'city only' plans is disengenious.

In this case despite Moscow's population being higher than NZ, it is concentrated in a far smaller place, and so we would expect BB to be much cheaper per person anyway if it is only provided to those people. Note that these plans are only for apartment blocks where the build costs can be shared between hundreds of people in a very small geographiocal footprint.

If NZ had a city the size and density of moscow with an ISP that used the massive amounts of residents crammed into apartment blocks to gain huge economies of scale with their BB network, and could offer geographically targeted plans to that extreme, had no Kiwishare requirements etc etc, then maybe we could make a fair comparison. Since we don't, you can't.

raytaylor

4008 posts

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#237038 20-Jul-2009 01:21

SepticSceptic:

I'm seriously considering writing in a submission to the Copyright Review - Section 92A Review Policy, and working in this little gem, to the effect that regional locks are currently forcing NZ internet users to become pirates in order to obtain TV series and movies that are available to download in the USA only.

This applies to both relatively recent releases, all the way down to the long-tail's where the TV series has already been screened a few times over the intervening years, ad revenue garnered, and now I want to plug a few holes in my collection, or replace purchased VHS movies with the digital equivalent.

A bit more reading of the appropriate acts, a few more coffees, and I might have something coherent to submit :-)

Be sure to include my little gripe about how i can no longer watch jon stewart and his daily show online since sky took on comedy central. I have comedy central as part of my sky package but i like to watch it online at 1am rather than whenever sky broadcast it.

Ray Taylor

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webwat

2036 posts

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#237730 22-Jul-2009 00:35

friedCrumpet:

I'm a bit unsure as to why the international data cost so much though. I'm sure there must be a mark up, ISP's are businesses after all, but I can't quite fathom where the actual post set up costs are. Is there some subtlety of kiwi network structure I'm missing?

There's basically only one cable that services New Zealand, so there is limited capacity and increased costs - but mostly (in my opinion) it's monopoly pricing.

You can compare by looking at an undersea cable map the number of cables connecting the UK/Europe with the rest of the world and the measily two (actually only one split into mutiple parts) that we have.

The Southern Cross cable did lose money for many years, cost about a billion to install I think. They are finally promising to upgrade the bandwidth on it, but dont expect them to be interested in big losses again. Its a dual cable for redundancy, and there is a cable inking us to Ozzy too, but most data goes through Southern Cross because thats the one with capacity.

Time to find a new industry!

Ragnor

8196 posts

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#237787 22-Jul-2009 10:19

The cable cost nearer to 2 billion (in USD not NZD), bank debt raised to finance the project was repaid within 2-3 years off the cable opening it's misleading to say they made big losses.

Capacity has periodically been upgraded over the cables life with new technology and more fibers lit up, for example that started in 2000 with 20 Gbit/s and last time I checked capacity was 720 Gbit/s at the end of 2008.

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