New Zealand #24: Cisco Third Annual Broadband study

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freitasm

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#70169 19-Oct-2010 20:05

Just released, a study by Cisco (2010) shows New Zealand in #24 of the Top 30 countries around the world in broadband, with average speeds download 4,632 Kbps (kilobits per second), upload 682 Kbps (kilobits per second) and 63% broadband penetration. The download speeds is 21% improvement over last year, upload speeds only 12% better than the previous year.

Compare to Korea with download speeds of 33,897 Kbps and uploads of 16,897 Kbps and 100% broadband penetration.

The press release is here with a good tool to check different countries.

NzKaizer

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#394507 21-Oct-2010 20:10

A great example of a fail survey. Clearly did not take into account for data caps.

ojala

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#394523 21-Oct-2010 20:47

There has been a lot of discussion with local ICT journalist friends what that study actually means. No doubt one can get superior broadband access in e.g. Sweden and South Korea, both have invested in fiber infrastructure for a long time and the infrastructure in general is at great shape.

But how exactly does the Speedtest results show the mobile broadband quality? For example if Austria has 28 Mbit/s HSPA+ available in the major cities and Portugal has 7.2 Mbit/s available across the country, the Speedtest results will show that Austria is is superior to Portugal. But is that really the case when 90% of Austria has only EDGE? If Belgium has excellent mobile broadband for a very high cost, compared to Norway with average mobile broadband at low cost, which one is actually better? Belgium could have just 10,000 mobile broadband users while Norway could have 4,000,000.

And how exactly does one extract the mobile and broadband penetration data from Speedtest results? Speedtest is not a tool that everyone uses, a majority of broadband users will never test their connection. If it works, that's fine. As FTTH/FTTB is being deployed, those folks will be the first to run Speedtest to see their 100-1000 Mbit/s rates. Aren't games very picky about latency and perhaps use Speedtest more than average users?

Also why do people use Speedtest. I use it to troubleshoot problems, I don't remember if I have ever run it on my fixed broadband. I can see that my ADSL2+ is synced at 16/1M and I'm fine with that. When I got the iPhone 4 back in June, I ran Speedtest about a hundred times to see that it would go from full bars, 5-7 Mbit/s down to crawling EDGE if I hold it in my hand. People use it to see how fast mobile broadband they get when sailing in the archipelago or from their summer house by the lake.

Anyway, Cisco's study does provide some decent data on many things and by far it's the best you can get for that money. But some of the conclusions and rankings feel a bit far fetched..

alliao

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#394543 21-Oct-2010 21:19

the idea is setting a common test point for a group of people, rather than everyone madly testing against google.com which then becomes highly irrelevant as load balancing etc kicks in..

not perfect, but nothing's better in a way.

the sync speed in nz is delusional by the way, I sync at 20Mbps or there abouts, but I can never get speeds that high.

Whereas in US if you connect at 10Mbps then almost everything comes in at full speed.

http://www.netindex.com/promise/2,1/United-States/?tab=3

this isn't very far off from my experience.

cyril7

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#394554 21-Oct-2010 21:38

the sync speed in nz is delusional by the way, I sync at 20Mbps or there abouts, but I can never get speeds that high.

Yes it seems Chorus have fixed their end, but Telecom Wholesale and others have still a way to go.

Cyril

ojala

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#394584 21-Oct-2010 22:57

the sync speed in nz is delusional by the way, I sync at 20Mbps or there abouts, but I can never get speeds that high.

Whereas in US if you connect at 10Mbps then almost everything comes in at full speed.

Just for comparison; a quick Speedtest and I (from Helsinki, Finland) get full speed pretty much from anywhere around Europe. There speeds are equal for the local server, London, Amsterdam, and even Bukarest in Romania.

Speedtest to North America or Asia and the speed drops to about half, or two thirds.

seamonkey

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#394598 22-Oct-2010 00:06

NzKaizer: A great example of a fail survey. Clearly did not take into account for data caps.

Thats because data caps are not an issue for most countries? Only NZ/Aus isnt it?

Or if overseas countries have them they are in the hundreds of gigs, so not really a factor :>

ojala

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#394610 22-Oct-2010 01:50

Thats because data caps are not an issue for most countries? Only NZ/Aus isnt it?

One can find odd caps here and there, especially with mobile broadband, but AUS/NZ are the most noticeable.

I was looking at Telstra's Big Pond the other day and noticed that they have four plans:
- 1.5/256k ADSL with 2G cap
- Full rate ADSL(2+) with 2G cap
- Full rate ADSL(2+) with 50G cap
- Full rate ADSL(2+) with 200G cap
The first two are very cheap, 10-20 AUD/month. The last two are very similar in price, 50 and 70 AUD/month. All caps are soft, the connection slowed to 64k or 256k when over.

They are so close to uncapped access that I'm surprised that if in 12 months they don't drop the caps, perhaps move some restrictions to the T&C. THe 2G cap folks can move to mobile broadband, the 10-20 AUD/month plans are already there.

When will NZ follow rest of the world?

Quic Broadband

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ojala

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#394611 22-Oct-2010 02:00

ojala: Just for comparison; a quick Speedtest and I (from Helsinki, Finland) get full speed pretty much from anywhere around Europe. There speeds are equal for the local server, London, Amsterdam, and even Bukarest in Romania.

Speedtest to North America or Asia and the speed drops to about half, or two thirds.

I got curious and asked a few friends with their 100+ Mbit/s cable TV and fiber connections what they get with Speedtest. A friend with 200/10M cable TV connection got 92/7 locally, 24/5 to London, 8/5 to New York. Other friend with 85/45 got 72M locally, 59M to London and 6M to New York. All use different carriers so the numbers aren't equal, but the big picture seems to be very similar with all the carriers -- within Europe ok but longer doesn't really matter what local speed you have (could also be an issue with Speedtest).

ojala

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#394612 22-Oct-2010 02:01

ojala: Just for comparison; a quick Speedtest and I (from Helsinki, Finland) get full speed pretty much from anywhere around Europe. There speeds are equal for the local server, London, Amsterdam, and even Bukarest in Romania.

Speedtest to North America or Asia and the speed drops to about half, or two thirds.

I got curious and asked a few friends with their 100+ Mbit/s cable TV and fiber connections what they get with Speedtest. A friend with 200/10M cable TV connection got 72/6 to London, 11/7 to New York and 11/5 all the way down to Wellington (17000 km!). Other friend with 85/45 got 72M locally, 59M to London and 6M to New York. I'm not sure how reliable Speedtest is over longer distances.

Ragnor

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#394614 22-Oct-2010 02:25

ISP's can and do whitelist speedtest servers from their normal traffic management/shaping/prioritisation to give a better impression.

It's too well known and too specific, epitrio who do the quarterly performance reports for the Commerce Commission use a range of tests local and international.

In NZ (and AU too) I would say in general a large proportion of us hosted content is consumed compared to local, pretty much the opposite of everywhere else in the world.

This may have changed slightly with pretty much every major NZ ISP hosting google/youtube and akamai caches now.. however you can't underestimate the effect of torrenting from public trackers, usenet downloads and http filesharing via rapidshare/megaupload/hotfile etc.

ojala

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#394618 22-Oct-2010 02:42

Ragnor: In NZ (and AU too) I would say in general a large proportion of us hosted content is consumed compared to local, pretty much the opposite of everywhere else in the world.

With the low data caps that include national traffic, it's not really a surprise. The local content providers must be really suffering when people are just trying to keep all their usage within the caps.

I was really surprised with one detail in the NZ Statistics ISP report; March 2007 65% had 5G cap and 93% had 20G or less cap. Jun 2010 and the percentages are still 43% and 84%. That's very little development -- no matter wherefrom the content is.

alliao

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#394707 22-Oct-2010 11:12

With the number of young people leaving the country, I am not really surprised. Looking at census NZ, there's an obvious exodus for young people who contributes most heavily to digital demand (according to stereotype anyway).

I suppose we can start giving away HD webcams to boost demand? :P

ockel

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#394716 22-Oct-2010 11:46

seamonkey:
NzKaizer: A great example of a fail survey. Clearly did not take into account for data caps.

Thats because data caps are not an issue for most countries? Only NZ/Aus isnt it?

Or if overseas countries have them they are in the hundreds of gigs, so not really a factor :>

The OECD broadband portal has plenty of data about caps (by country). Being the OECD the data is out of date but it gives a snapshot.

There were 13 countries with caps with 5 of these having caps covering more than 50% of offers in the country marketplace. So not just Australia and NZ. And no, the other counties caps are not in the "hundreds of gigs". But perception and reality are wonderfully diametrically opposed concepts in many many areas.

NZ is reported to have an average data cap size of 26Gb. Shows how wonderful the data is reported in all the surveys etc.

GIGO.

Sixth Labour Government - "Vision without Execution is just Hallucination"

ojala

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#394847 22-Oct-2010 19:08

ockel:
There were 13 countries with caps with 5 of these having caps covering more than 50% of offers in the country marketplace. So not just Australia and NZ. And no, the other counties caps are not in the "hundreds of gigs". But perception and reality are wonderfully diametrically opposed concepts in many many areas.

And if you look at the other three, Canada, Iceland and Belgium, more closely.

CA: www.bell.ca, Fibe 12, $37/month, 50 GB of bandwidth per month.
But then again, www.canadianisp.ca for e.g. Montreal. 27 ISP's. 12 with "No Cap", most with 200 GB cap.
Trying to understand Canada's data caps is even mystery than Aus/NZ caps, would love to hear their excuses. Bell CA is also advertising ADSL2+ like it was something super new and super fast, heh.

Iceland: http://www.siminn.is/einstaklingar/netid/askrift/ljosnet/
Three services, each at up to 50 Mbit/s. Data caps are 10G, 60G and 120G. From 3890 ISK to 7090 ISK a month.
http://tal.is/Einstaklingar/INTERNET/Verðskrá.aspx
Very similar case, ADSL2+, from 1GB to 120GB, 2690 ISK to 6790 ISK a month.
That 120 GB data cap is 52 NZD/month. Data cap isn't really a big pricing element, 10x increase in cap is 2x price. Could be handled in the T&C's with throttling the speed down due misuse.

Iceland is a country with 318,000 people that is as far away from mainland Europe as New Zealand is from Australia. Looking at the submarine cable maps, Iceland has FARICE-1 (720 Gb/s), Danice (5.2 Tb/s), Shefa (570 Gb/s), and Greenland Connect to Greenland and Canada (1.9 Tb/s). That's 6.5 Tb/s to Europe and 1.9 Tb/s to the US -- for a country smaller than Wellington. The old CANTAT-3 that used to power internet in Europe back in mid 90's was also connected to Iceland. Though, Reykjavik IX peaks at around 700-900 Mbit/s so the 318,000 people don't really generate that much local traffic, at least not between different providers.

Why do I get the feeling that some instances have had a great interest to keep New Zealand from being properly connected? Just the paranoid part of me, worked too much with the incumbent players back then and the game wasn't always fair..

Belgium: http://www.belgacom.be/private/en/jsp/dynamic/productCategory.jsp?dcrName=internet_access_withvoice
From 18.90€ a month with 15 GB data cap to 42.90€ a month with 100 GB.
Add 10€/month for unlimited data cap.
http://offer.mobistar.be/nl/aanbod/internet/
From basic ADSL with 35GB data cap at 25 €/month, to ADSL2+ without data cap at 40€/month.

Now that AUS' Big Pond have caps at 50G/200G available for reasonable price, what is left is really just NZ.

.. just wondering. I used to work for FUNET, the finnish university and research network in the 90's and it is part of NORDUnet, nordic university network. Iceland is part of it as well so that's how I thought about it.. I believe this co-operation has been a big reason why there is so much communications in the nordic countries, nowadays light paths directly between universities in the nordic countries, IP links multiple 10-40 GB/s, etc. I couldn't help wondering what's the co-operation between AARNet and Karen?