NZ Plan For Fiber To the Home

Ars has a note about New Zealand's plans for nationwide broadband access, which will induce envy in many North American readers. "New Zealand has decided not to sit around while incumbent DSL operators milk the withered dugs of their cash cow until it keels over from old age. Instead, the Kiwis have established a government-owned corporation to invest NZ$1.5 billion for open-access fiber to the home. By 2020, 75 percent of residents should have, at a bare minimum, 100Mbps down/50 Mbps up with a choice of providers. Crown Fibre Holdings Limited is the company, and it's wholly owned by the government — for now — and the company's mission couldn't be any clearer. Two of its six guiding principles include 'focusing on building new infrastructure, and not unduly preserving the "legacy assets" of the past' and 'avoiding "lining the pockets" of existing broadband network providers.'"

International will still suck

[kickme_hax0r]

Yet, this corporation doesn't take into account New Zealand's main bottle-neck: the Southern Cross Cable. Only having one link to the rest of the internet, and that link is owned by a for-profit business, makes for piss-poor international bandwidth. Luckily, there are some people making some noise about laying another cable, just so there's no longer a monopoly and we might actually get some decent speeds.

Setting the bar low

[Alarindris]

Isn't this like saying in 2000 "By 2010 we hope 75% of people have a 56k connection"?

10 years is a long time. A real goal would be more like 2Gb symmetrical. Or something.

Re:Setting the bar low

[Eivind]

Yes and no. The thing is, there's 2 parts needed for a connection: some kinda physical link, and suitable tranceivers in each end of the physical link. Changing the physical link (the copper-pair or the optical fibre) is expensive and difficult. Changing the tranceivers on the ends of an existing cable, on the other hand, is as simple as buying a new faster modem (i.e. the consumer can do it himself, and the cost can be less than $100.)

We've got fibre. The current tranceiver is just capable of 1Gbps, but that's just because currently there's no demand for more, and faster tranceivers are expensive today. (infact we're currently subscribing for only 100Mbps of internet-connectivity, so they artificially limit us in their router) If in a decade a gigabit seems puny, the actual physical fibre is capable of at least 1Tbps, with TODAYS tranceivers. (yes, those things are expensive today, but so where gigabit ethernet-cards, once upon a time)

So short answer: Once you've got a decent-quality single-mode fibre to your basement, you've got enough bandwith in the fibre for a while. I don't want to guess if/when a terabit to your home is going to start feeling puny, but I doubt it'll be this decade.

Re:And 3Gb data limits

[_merlin]

Data limits won't change. Fibre-to-the-home doesn't magically increase the bandwidth of transoceanic cables. Bandwidth in and out of NZ will still be just as expensive, so the transfer caps will stay in force.

Re:Deja Vu

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering if you are retarded or incompetent.
Regional areas are where we need fibre the most, the cost of having an upgrade in speed using copper in these areas will require significantly more exchanges to be built without the same benefits that fibre has over copper, doesn't sound very economical not to mention the constant degradation of the state of the copper. Maybe your thinking of rural areas they are defined very differently.
Not to mention you don't have an activist trying to do something he believes is right in a industry they knows nothing about. NBN's CEO Mike Quigley spent 37 with Alcatel before being passed over for CEO due to the merger to become Alcatel-Lucent (Lucent's CEO got the job). Don't discount this project just because it was proposed by Kevin Rudd there are people with skills managing this project not Kevin Rudd.

Re:And 3Gb data limits

[Mistakill]

the issue is, as i believe it, NZ Telecom is the major shareholder of the Southern Cross Cable, the link between the US, and NZ...

thus no matter who you get data from, eventually, they're paying NZ Telecom money, and they're not exactly in a hurry to lower the cost of data, as there is no reason to, due to no real competition

Re:And 3Gb data limits

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Telecom like to give good deals to xtra. An ISP that is a telecom subsidiary. The rest pay full price. I have friends working in NZ ISP's (I did myself at one point) and what goes on behind the curtain is pretty insane. NZ Telecom is so blatantly anti competitive at an illegal level its a total joke. And the consumer watch dog does SFA. Its also difficult to raise the issues legally as telecom will have "technical issues" with your adsl customers, and you go out of business before anything gets done.

Re:International will still suck

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Telecos may not tell you this. But there are more than that cable servicing NZ international bandwidth. There is at least one going to the west cost of USA and one heading up to japan. They installed the latest pacific cable while i was still living in NZ, with the cable work on one of the beaches in Auckland making the news papers. A new cable like that has serious capacity.

Fact is, most of the "bandwidth caps" and costs have more to do with artificial scarcity and cheaper local infrastructure. As an example I could regularly get +10Mbit to USA at Auckland University pretty much any time of day and often more than 50Mbit. That about as good as i get to USA from here (EU).

Re:Deja Vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, from the City of Stockholm's -symmetric- 100 Mb/Sec (both ways) cheap, unlimited plan.

They've had it for a while & - unlike silly Australia - they have no plans to sell it later.

Swedes seem to KNOW HOW TO KEEP IMPORTANT ASSETS.

They continue to impress me & as they have since the day I learned that:
Swedes NEVER fight in others' wars.

Neutral means Neutral... as well as higher quality of Life than others enjoy.