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The Internet Australia

New Zealand To Bring Ultrafast Internet To 85 Percent Of Population (stuff.co.nz) 147

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Ultrafast broadband is coming to more than another 200,000 homes, but doubts are already being expressed that the expansion of the network isn't quite ambitious enough. From a report: Another 423,000 people will be able get ultrafast broadband (UFB) by the end of 2024 as a result of a long-awaited decision to expand the network. Prime Minister Bill English said UFB would be extended to more than 151 additional towns, on top of the 33 cities that are already getting the service. The expansion will mean UFB will be available to "up to 85 per cent" of the population, up from the 75 per cent coverage that is planned to be delivered by 2020.
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New Zealand To Bring Ultrafast Internet To 85 Percent Of Population More

New Zealand To Bring Ultrafast Internet To 85 Percent Of Population

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  • With an small download cap! (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Thursday January 26, 2017 @09:45AM (#53741799)

    With an small download cap!

    • Re:With an small download cap! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Lead Butthead ( 321013 ) on Thursday January 26, 2017 @12:01PM (#53742531) Journal

      With an small download cap!

      In USA, we much rather charge more for less than build out infrastructure.

      • With an small download cap!

        In USA, we much rather charge more for less than build out infrastructure.

        Anything else would be a disservice to the stockholders - where do your loyalties lie, exactly?

        • No idiots in the US would rather give internet, phone, and cable companies local monopolies for what ever reason that kills competition.

          Currently I live in Tampa where we have excellent internet service where you can get it. Unfortunately HOAs, apartment complexes, and some counties have implemented deals that give only 1 service provide access to customers. In those places you can get service that is so so for way to high of a price..

          Luckily I live in none of those places. On a lark just called up

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • That would go against the name they picked for the project. It's Ultra fast. Beyond the very concept of high speed.

        Huh! I won't sign up for that until they provide ludicrous-speed broadband. I want my router to go plaid.

    • Re:With an small download cap! (Score:5, Informative)

      by alavaliant ( 1002928 ) on Thursday January 26, 2017 @01:09PM (#53743159)
      That would have been true perhaps a year or two back. Now in New Zealand almost all isps started offering an uncapped plan, I've been one one for some time now.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Nope.
      NZ$75 (US$54) gets you unlimited 100/30 with no traffic shaping , no port blocking, no data caps, just Naked Broadband, net neutrality service.

      ALL ISPs(over 20 last time I looked) are accessible as they pay a per customer wholesale rate set by the government and they differentiate themselves by having "additions", e.g. discount if you have cellular service with them, a local customer support office, lightbox (netflix competitor).

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I have UFB at home, its a 1000/500 connection with no data cap. Data caps aren't really a thing anymore in New Zealand, most ISPs moved away from that model a while back.

      • And how much speed to you get to a USA or Europe based server? NZ is "far" from most of the Internet. They can sell you a gigabit connection but saturate the oceanic cable. What matters is what speed do you get out of your island?

        • I have the 1000Mbps plan too and the fastest speed I have seen while downloading is from Steam, which was a little over 30MBps, i.e. 240Mbps, although I'm not sure where the nearest Steam server is. Of course, Steam might have a bandwidth limit, my hard disk might not write faster than that, etc. I think SpeedTest.net said 100-200Mbps to America, but I haven't tested it in a while. Regardless, it's unlikely we'd ever get 1Gbps, at least unless they install new international cables.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by LesFerg ( 452838 )

            I have hired movies on youtube in HD, but they always have multiple pauses while waiting for data.
            I don't know where youtube movies are streamed from for NZ tho.

        • Judging by how much US people bitch about their ISP, I am guessing we get better speeds than most US citizens.

          The Fibre links to the rest of the world are actually not too bad, and there is possibly going to be another fibre put in within a couple of years, however there is still spare capacity on exiting cables.
          Doing file transfers (Diptrace 3D models for OSX a 1.9GB file) I hit 5MB/s and averaged over 3MB/s while the missus was watching netflix, all on VDSL

          I get Fibre June next year apparently.

          An

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          It enables the creation of content, this has been covered many times before. With high speed broadband, content can be readily shuffled back and forth between people, as they work on it. This allows cheaper content creation from home, many people, in many homes, working together without office costs, a huge fiscal burden. They can meet online, organise online and share creation on line, does not even need to be full time, can all be done part time, hugely reducing the need for early capital investment.

          Of c

          • Are you saying NZ has a very large (and fast) LAN but its actual connection to the Internet (the outside world) is slow?

        • And how much speed to you get to a USA or Europe based server? NZ is "far" from most of the Internet. They can sell you a gigabit connection but saturate the oceanic cable. What matters is what speed do you get out of your island?

          Do you think that a country with a reasonably advanced policy toward the internet haven't heard of CDNs?
          Also, the internet has moved on from the US-centric network of the 90's. Most people these days use the Internet to access local services and content.

    • Err, I haven't had a download cap here in NZ for many years, I don't know of anyone who doesn't choose an unlimited plan.
      Glowing strands of fiber in my living room (everyone gets two strands of fiber in fact for future proofing!), can't beat that! Everyone who has access to fiber can get Gigabit Internet now.
      New overseas pipes also going live shortly.
      Also, we have one of the fastest 4G networks in the world, that's because we DO have caps on mobile data usage.
      NZ Internet has come a LONG way in the past few

      • I'm just commenting to back you up. We had a data cap, but then my kids got older and started streaming video, playing games, and whatnot, and the data cap was a giant pain in the backside.

        I'm getting 38 mbps on VDSL, which I'm reasonably happy with, but we do have fibre in our street, so I will look into that.

        The problem is having a shared driveway, I have to get all the neighbors to agree to letting the installers have access which might be hard.

        The other point I wanted on make is the standard of exper

        • Do you have overhead powerlines/phone down your shared driveway to your house? If so, they'll just string up another wire. That's what they did for us down our shared driveway with three houses between us and the road. Install was done extremely quickly and competently. I believe they did that on the inspection/planning date when they saw what was involved, rather than waiting for the installation date a week later.
          However at my office when I got Fiber installed there (4 offices in block), was the opposite

  • ... as 512kbps ?

    • Re:Also redefines Ultra-Fast... (Score:5, Informative)

      by msauve ( 701917 ) on Thursday January 26, 2017 @09:58AM (#53741865)

      Ultra-Fast Broadband is taken to mean the availability of broadband services at a minimum speed of 100 Mbps Downstream (from the Internet to the user) and a minimum of 50 Mbps Upstream (from user to the Internet).

      - CFH, NZ [crownfibre.govt.nz].

      (Since neither the summary nor the linked article could be bothered to say...)

      • 100 Mbps may sound cool, but remember we're talking about upside-down bandwidth here...

        • "Ultra Fast" is such a relative term. I remember when at T1 was "ultra fast", when everyone was on dialup. To me, "Ultra Fast" is meaningless marketing drivel.

          • When you can stream 4K video to every screen in the house, is it fast enough yet?

            • When you can stream 4K video to every screen in the house, is it fast enough yet?

              4K is a number. 1MB is a number. High speed and ultra fast are useless just as is calling something a "medium sized softdrink". What's wrong with using something like 1M/s or 100M/s or 1K/s? I would even be ok with it being a multiple of something arbitrary or a power of something arbitrary. Cdrom drives used multiples of the first speed so a quad speed was 4 times faster. Horsepower is an approximation of a horse. At least if you created a standard that made sense then everyone could communicate easi

              • Numbers can be factually proven wrong, resulting in the need to invoke alternate facts as the basis of the author's infalliability.

                Statements like "Ultra Premium Super High Speed Deluxe" can never be proven wrong, and thus fly right through technical, legal and marketing approval reviews.

        • That's true. If you're not careful all the bits fall out and you have to go a sweep them up.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by LesFerg ( 452838 )

            That's true. If you're not careful all the bits fall out and you have to go a sweep them up.

            Ha, you should use Linux. Thats why it has sticky bits.

    • I always wonder about the use of the term "Ultra"

      You aren't leaving yourself any room for expansion in the future.... what is the next speed increase going to be marketed as? super ultra? ultimate ultra?

  • NZ population (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 ) on Thursday January 26, 2017 @09:50AM (#53741829) Homepage

    The expansion will mean UFB will be available to "up to 85 per cent" of the population

    So basically Auckland.

    • It doesn't matter. If the govt keeps handing out citizenship to billionaires so they can buy up large parts of the country for their private estates without having to seek permission, no New Zealander will be allowed outside of Auckland in a few more years.

    • No, New Zealand exists outside of Auckland. We are not sure what Auckland actually is any more, but part of New Zealand.... tough call.

      • No, New Zealand exists outside of Auckland.

        Only as far as the Bombay Hills. After that it's... I dunno, hobbits? wetas? moas? I suppose there must be something out there, not sure what though.

  • By the way? 50 Mbps? 100 Mbps? 1 Gbps? Was it that difficult to say that?

    • "Ultra Fast" is a comparative term, and apart from being relativistic is meaningless. That way, you can always disparage those that have faster / slower internet than this. The "One Percenter" is obviously abusing his wealth, and the poor guy on less than "Ultra" is somehow wronged by those with faster internet.

      Once you realize that terms like this are designed to cause strife and envy, it makes it very clear what the goal is. We NEED government to fix the obvious injustice of internet speeds!

  • >> New Zealand To Bring Ultrafast Internet To 85 Percent Population

    But not to underground cities. Clearly, this policy discriminates against Balrogs and Orcs on a racial basis.

  • Ultra Fast is relative (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Thursday January 26, 2017 @10:07AM (#53741921)

    Unfortunately for New Zealand, Ultrafast is relative. They're at the end of the cable. New Zealand connects to Australia which connects to Asia which connects to Europe and North America.

    Since many websites are hosted on severs on "the other end of the cable" they have to bounce around many servers and potential bottlenecks before they get to the server they seek. Sites based in the US and Europe may still take a long time to load for the kiwis.

    • Sites based in the US and Europe may still take a long time to load for the kiwis.

      I didn't know sites were based anywhere anymore. The most popular content and also the largest and slowest loading content seems to be on CDNs spread all over the globe. The amount of data that actually crosses the cables is a tiny fraction of the data being delivered to end users these days.

    • They couldn't possibly create their own content. Not everything comes out of the US and revolves around them.

      • # of IT workers in the US: 6.5million.
        Population of New Zealand: 4.5 million.

        Of course New Zealand, can and does create their own content, as does Australia; however a decent amount of the websites they visit will have a round trip to a server in Europe or North America. It's a numbers game. Even if New Zealand was fully devoted to IT development they're going to have a lot of content from overseas. With any luck though they can stream "Meet the Feebles" from a local source.

    • There are direct cables to the US from NZ.
      a new "Tasman Global Access" cable will be in operation March 2017 (to Oz) and another direct cable to the US (Hawaiki Cable) active June 2018.
      A further cable to the US is apparently being planned for 2019 as well, concentrating on less lag.
      I have a feeling NZ is setting itself up to be the next Ireland, IT is now NZ's third biggest export.

      • All good news for New Zealand then! I know my friends there complain about everything lagging and IT people there talk about being at "the far end of the internet" looks like New Zealand is proactively making steps to rectify that- good for them.

        • I came back to NZ in 2011. Internet was total rubbish back then.
          Now, it's becoming world leading, amazing transformation, in the past couple of years alone.
          I RDC in to desktops in the US and UK everyday. Both are perfectly usable latency wise, biggest issues are at the UK and US ends where the offices aren't on fiber!
          If I RDC in to my local office from home, it's so good I can happily play video over RDC.
          Really looking forward to those new overseas pipes going in though, just to improve overseas transfer sp

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rh2600 ( 530311 )
      Not entirely true - ie NZ has it's own direct cables to US via Hawaii, and a few adjuncts along the way that also get us into Asia etc. http://www.submarinecablemap.c... [submarinecablemap.com]

    • Unfortunately for New Zealand, Ultrafast is relative. They're at the end of the cable. New Zealand connects to Australia which connects to Asia which connects to Europe and North America.

      Since many websites are hosted on severs on "the other end of the cable" they have to bounce around many servers and potential bottlenecks before they get to the server they seek. Sites based in the US and Europe may still take a long time to load for the kiwis.

      Never heard of CDNs huh?

  • The NZ government defines UFB as a typical connection of 100 mbs download. The New Zealand population, for all the image of isolated sheep farmers, is unually urban. 85% of the population live in towns/ cities, and the cities of Auckland and Wellington alone account for 45% of the population. Altogether, to take another 8 years to get some 4 million people in a well ordered society up to 100 mbs is alarmingly unambitious.

    • In eight years, what we call "Ultra Fast" today, will be "ultra slow". So it is not only unambitious, it is ultimately meaningless. As a Politician success is pretty much guaranteed, "We brought Ultra High Speed Internet to the masses during my administration", when they did absolutely nothing, except get bribes and kickbacks from Internet Providers. Genius!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        If you read carefully this is a FTTH deployment. As such the hard part is putting the fibre in. Once the fibre is in then changing the optics at each end to go faster is relatively quick and cheap. Looks to be a G-PON deployment, which allows for an easy and seamless upgrade to 10G-PON and 100G-PON is in the works and can coexist with G-PN and 10G-PON. Very very few home users will require anything beyond 100G-PON anytime soon. There is also a NG-PON2 as well that fits in between 10G-PON and 100G-PON in ter

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      Politician promises vague outcomes over long timelines to group of people likely get something of the outcome anyway, film at 11.

  • Slashdot editing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by asvravi ( 1236558 ) on Thursday January 26, 2017 @10:17AM (#53741969)

    Yet again, up to the readers to do the job of the editors for them. How fast exactly is Ultra-Fast? Here is an extract from the New Zealand UFB page [ufb.org.nz] which also makes it clear that it is a replacement of existing ADSL with FTTH.

    In particular UFB upload speeds are typically at between 10-50 times faster than ADSL’s average 1MB/s upload.

    The most popular offerings (utilising GPON technology) are currently:

    – 30Mb/s download, 10Mb/s upload
    – 100Mb/s download, 50Mb/s upload

    Businesses and other organisations are able to purchase P2P (Point-to-Point) UFB fibre connections of up to 1Gigabit/s (1000Mb/s).

    Editors - get a clue.When you take news articles from all sorts of publications and present them to a largely homogenous readership, you can put in a little bit of additional effort to account for any assumptions the original sources may have made about their readers. Do not teach the slashdot crowd what JavaScript is. Do not assume everybody reading this story on Slashdot is from New Zealand and knows details of what UFB is.

  • More zombie sheep on the Internet.

  • I think a combined 1000gbit/sec dedicated connectivity to West coast us. So for 4.5million population makes huge sense to make best use of it.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cross_Cable

    Amazing how much lit and unlit capacity is being strung around world. Once it was cheaper for us to do back haul between continents and back than worry about cross country xfer.

    For apps with not big requirements for low Latency changes where you stick the edge nodes. Imagine one factor behind Netflix and amazon lau

    • It's 5400 gbit/sec but that cable also serves Australia. But let say it was only for NZ, that's still only 1.2 Mbps / person.

  • I am running 100Mbps up and 100Mbps down with a static IP address and unlimited data for NZD$99 a month (~ US $72). I'm told I can now have a 1Gbps service which is tempting but I have yet to max out my current connection.

    More roll out is good news, I know a couple of people who are a few meters short of the current service areas. Yes, like me, they are in Auckland but I know fibre is already available in smaller centers like Levin, where my family is. For farmers it would be great news as DSL service

  • I don't think they care about a baaaad connection

  • I can get around 800mbps to a US server, although this is not common but it's usually going to be contention at a router overseas that causes slowdowns, nothing inside the NZ ISPs control. And I don't know many people with caps anymore, I have used ~10TB a month and my ISP doesn't care. Lots of people still on 30/50mbps plans, but these are generally grandfathered plans. The base plan for many ISPs is 100/20 now which is about 50USD. My 1000/500 plan is 90USD. They even dug up my 60m driveway to install t
  • NZ has the worst Internet coverage of any country I have ever visited (and that includes many so-called developing countries such as Indonesia). It is possible to drive the main highway for almost 400 km from Wanaka to Franz Joseph without any cell phone coverage. Of course there is no fiber either and that area was not listed on the map referred in the article. So people traveling the road need to wait beyond 2024 for an improvement! That is simply unbelievable in any developed country.

    • NZ has the worst Internet coverage of any country I have ever visited (and that includes many so-called developing countries such as Indonesia). It is possible to drive the main highway for almost 400 km from Wanaka to Franz Joseph without any cell phone coverage.

      I'm not sure if this is a joke or not.
      Wanaka to Franz Josef is probably one of these most isolated roads on the planet. It is a national park and world heritage site, and one of these reason this area gets used for filming Lord of the Rings is precisely because there is no-one there (outside ignorant tourists).
      In the towns and cities, the Internet is pretty much the same as any developed country, good in some spots, not as good in some others. At least the govt has the vision to address this.

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