by frog
I’m somewhat surprised that pretty much no one has spoken up about this already, because the mistakes being made should be obvious to anyone with a slightly technical background. There are four points at which National’s fibre-to-the-home initiative falls over, any one of which is fatal:
1. There is no need for such fast speeds. The speed of our existing internet connections is already far more than adequate – most people’s connections rarely get fully utilised. Take my home – I have a 10 Mb connection, capable of transferring ~1000 kilobytes per second. 1000! Audio-only skype uses around 5 – 12 kilobytes. Skype with video maybe about 50 kilobytes. Youtube uses around 30 kilobytes. Bittorrent uses anything from 5 to 200 kilobytes, depending on the torrent. But hardly anyone uses bittorrent (legally). Web browsing is fine with even a 256k connection. Most computer games use only a couple of dozen kb per second. A couple of years ago I hosted a 12 person skype conference which used ~100 kilobytes per second.
All of these are so far below the maximum speed of my connection that it’s laughable. If there is ever any slowness, it’s because of something maxing out further upstream like a web server with many people using it or a technical problem. A faster connection from the cabinet to my computer won’t help that.
Are there any must-have applications or uses for ultra fast connections that are on the horizon? None that I can think of, and none which won’t blow my measly 10 gig data cap in a day (I’ll come back to the caps).
2. People who really need basic broadband exist. There are plenty of people still stuck on dialup or on the practically-dialup of 256k. You only need to go a few kilometres out of most small towns and access drops away quickly. Rural broadband just doesn’t exist, and most of those rural homes are also productive businesses not just passive consumers in the suburbs. We’d get more return on our investment by shifting the broadband-starved up to broadband than shifting the already broadband-rich into the stratosphere.
3. Uncertain economic benefits. There have been studies done which demonstrate economic benefits from upgrading from dial-up to broadband. Anecdotal evidence from my own life certainly backs that up. With basic broadband, you get: it’s always on so no connection delays, web pages that appear instantly, skype, streaming video, large file downloads, etc Fantastic stuff! But the benefits of upgrading from basic broadband (2Mb) to modern broadband (20Mb+) are far less obvious and unproven. The large gains are in the initial leap out of dial-up hell, any further speed improvements offer incremental gains only. Remember that the big push is to get fibre to the home, not to businesses which already have it and need it to share between many staff. So what if you can download porn lolcats faster, you were doing that when you had ADSL 1 anyway.
4. International bandwidth is the bottleneck. For many years Telstraclear would count national traffic at one tenth the rate of international traffic, for the purposes of computing how much of your cap you had used that month. Local traffic is so cheap that it’s almost not worth measuring – what you’re paying for is to get data from across the sea.
New Zealand is a bit unique among developed countries in that we have data caps (and think it’s normal!). Un-metered broadband is the norm in the USA. The reason that we have data caps is because of geography – we are stuck ages away from the rest of the world, far across the ocean. Only a cable or two connects the country to the rest of the world, and that is what is strangling NZ’s internet. It doesn’t matter how fast the connection from your ISP to your home is, the data cap will remain (small) as long as international bandwidth is expensive.
A different way ahead
If we want to boost the economy by improving internet access, then faster cheaper connections across the Tasman would lift data caps and allow us to make full use of the already fast internet we have. Improvements to rural and semi-rural connections would make more difference than fibre to the (suburban) home. Reducing the cost of cellphone data plans would revolutionise how people use their mobile phones. There are better uses for that $1.5 billion than digging ditches down every street and burying a lot of plastic.
The big picture
We tend to think that more of a good thing is better and that the things which worked well for us in the past will continue to work well in the future. I see ‘ultra fast broadband’ as a small part of that pattern, along with SUVs, iPads (with $30/mo 3G connection!) transmission gully and Airbus A320s. I see blindness about infinite economic growth on a finite planet (with it’s side effects of climate change and peak oil) as part of that too.
Sometimes, more is just not necessary and simply becomes an extra burden to carry.
Published in Economy, Work, & Welfare by frog on Tue, February 16th, 2010
Tags: boondoggle, broadband, modernism, ultra fast
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
For many people, yes there is no need for high speed connections – for trademe and email, a 256k *is* fast enough. For us technogeeks, a 10mb connection (or higher) is bliss – I dont want to have to wait 5 seconds for a page to load. Having this capability without the over-priced small caps would be good.
I do also totally agree that the money would be better spent on connections outside the country – adding some redundancy and lowering traffic prices. Having a telecommunications network that isnt overloaded by everyone having unlimited txts (especially when txts are a pittance of the overall traffic) would also be good.
What we really need to do is fix what we have first and then look to what we can do to grow sustainably.
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What I am concerned about is the amount of money being sunk into a costly fixed technology connected to my home at a time when more and more activity is shifting to wireless platforms. In 10 years time when we’re doing almost everything wirelessly (over 3G/WIMAX etc) there just won’t be the widespread desire to pay for pricey “ultra-fast” broadband locked to the home.
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I’d like to see fibre to the home (FTTH) be a universal service provision. Thanks to the unbundling of local loops, as entirely predicted, we now have a multiple classes of internet: there is internet for those who live in unbunbdled heaven, and those who get what they’re given, which is in some cases, no usable internet at all. If FTTH was universal, then everyone could get whatever they were willing to pay for.
Here in Christchurch, where there is unbundling, naked DSL, telstraclear cable, and MUSH fibre, there are still many people who choose dial-up because it’s cheap. One community has even figured out the can actually have free email and pay-as-you-go surfing via dialup, and choose to use that over anything requiring monthly payments…
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Thanks for your comments guys. I agree, except
Nate: Yeah I love fast internet too. But hopefully National is not throwing around lollies and toys just to placate the technogeek voters, hopefully they think this actually has some merit for our economy and are really serious about running the country!
I’ll give them that much credit. To me it looks like their mistake is one of “more is always better” and “faster means progress”, which, given that it’s our society’s modus operandi, I can understand them falling for.
decanker: The ‘killer app’ of the internet is email. That’s been the huge productivity booster, the thing which we *all* (even your grandma) use all the time, the thing that has revolutionised communication. Nothing like that has happened since – all other improvements have been incremental. Do you see anything as revolutionary as email (that is also extremely bandwidth intensive) in the near future? Something that even your grandma will use?
I just don’t see that kind of revolution on the horizon, one that would justify the government throwing this sort of weight behind it. I live and breath the internet, if there was one coming, I’d know about it
If our home internet connections were struggling to cope with our existing usage and we were suffering under a monopoly provider who refused to upgrade their infrastructure, then maybe we might be about to build a case for government intervention in the market. This may even be what is happening with the Southern Cross cable, our single link to Australia, but it’s not the case with the connection from the cabinet to our computers – the local loop has been unbundled, and ADSL 2 is on it’s way. Labour took care of that (belatedly).
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I think we have to accept that the want/need for ever-faster Internet is a moot point.
But why sink so much money into fibre technology when most of our net use is going to be via portable wireless devices?
This rollout is yet another massive sop to the infrastructure sector that have no need or concern for a viable retail business model. And actually, correct me if I’m wrong, but the infrastructure companies involved are legislated against being retailers on the fibre they drop in, so what do they care?
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I guess the infrastructure companies could create subsidiaries that operate in the retail market. Similar to Telecom and Xtra.
Wireless is potentially very disruptive, yes. I considered including that in the original post but the duopoly of Voda/Telecom is stifling it so I’m not sure whether it will take off or not. Whoosh has been struggling along for years and getting no where.
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lolz.
It has always been about the size of the pipe, not the distribution within the shores.
Anyone in any IT industry area has known Key was lying to attract support from the boonies, ever since he first campaigned on this policy.
He has made himself a public laughing-stock within the ‘connected’ community. Not intelligent.
No-one at LinuxConf would have even bothered to discuss that piece of policy; it would cost more than NZ can spare as a percentage of GDP to put another international cable in, and John Key knows it. (if he didn’t before, I’ll bet someone at TelstraClear has quietly taken him aside & told him, now)
Telecom have been dodging this bullet all the time Teresa Gattung was in control, which is why our gsm network was so lousy for a decade, too – the infrastucture investment was secondary to her continued high directorship fee.
I pity the current CEO, trying to explain why our telecommunications were so far behind to Steven Joyce, who was so keen to spend tax dollars on an ephemeral goal.
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I’m pretty sure one of the Telcos is laying a new Tasman cable at a pretty hefty price and faster speeds as we speak…
Joyce can say a job well done and put that $1.5 billion into something useful (like a new Auckland rail line, ha, ha if only)…
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
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I am aware of that. Google is welcome to waste it’s money on whatever it likes.
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http://www.solarstorms.org/SS1989.html
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I don’t know whether to agree or disagree. In my situation, the faster the better because my work largely depends on it, however for the average home, it probably isn’t justified.
My biggest beef at the moment is the lack of lack of local peering by the larger telcos. For example for me to connect and download stuff from some particular Servers based about 10km from my location, the data is routed via the US. This is particularly the case if my wife want’s to watch her fav TV show on TVNZ’s Ondemand service. On Somedays it feels like it would be faster to get in my gas guzzler and emit copious quantities of carbon in order to drive down to the city and get what I want on CD. Now if these ISP’s were to peer at the local peering exchanges without the current regime of restrictive arrangements which put the small ISP’s at a great disadvantage, then we’d probably have all the international capacity we needed to view our fill of HD grade youtube content without the current hours worth of cache-ing required at the moment.
And I have a 10Mb/s connection!
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You’re wrong.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
At one point, Bill Gates was wrong. He said computers wouldn’t require any more that 640K of ram.
The demand for bandwidth will be infinite. All communications will go over it. The lot.
At this point, it’s like we’re arguing about 14K
I’m right. You’re wrong.
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The answer is massive local caching. Google are already doing it. They’ve got container-sized server arrays, which cache, positioned at the nodes. Google will be the network.
http://blogs.sun.com/hoffie/entry/cringley_labels_blackbox_sun_s
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Down-vote all you like, you’ll still be wrong.
Bandwidth = expectation. It always has been the case. The expectation will be whatever the visual standard is at the time i.e movie theatre level definition in real time.
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The other incorrect assumption may be that streets have to be dug up to install fibre. There are a lot of pipes already buried in various streets and fibre can be drawn through many of these without having to do any digging. This is not applicable to all streets of course, and some companies will elect to dig rather than rent access from the various pipe owners.
Trevor.
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BluePeter, It won’t help at all if my ISP decides that the other side of the world sits between my connection and the local cache.
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Sorting out local peering could make a bigger difference than running fibre to each home, particularly for telecommuting. It would certainly be cheaper and should be able to be implemented sooner.
Trevor.
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Suggest Frog bookmarks this thread, then comes back to it in ten years. It’s like arguing that a 56K modem is quite sufficient – which people did.
Anyways, why aren’t greens getting behind high capacity digital highways? It means people will be less likely to use the paved ones.
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Work from home is a GREEN issue – spend time with family, in your community, and the biggie: Lower your carbon footprint.
VPN – Virtual Private Networks are key to working from home as if you were in your office. Access all of your files in real-time as if it was your hard disk, access software on your work machine from home. It all requires ultra-fast internet to work nicely. That’s the way things work in the States in a lot of cities now and you can easily do computing heavy work from home looking after your new-born.
Get green frogblog – think telecommuting, think lower carbon footprints. Ultra-fast internet is the key to everyone doing it.
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Has anyone else noticed that nearly all corporate LANs have been on 100 Mb/sec for the last 10+ years? Gigabit ethernet has been available for a very long time but unless you have, say, a dozen graphic designers constantly saving huge photoshop files onto a file server, it’s a waste of money.
I realise the difference between a LAN and a WAN but still it’s an example of a situation where upgrades are not always needed.
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Graham, I frequently worked from home on a 4 Mb connection. I was upgraded to a 10 Mb connection last month, and it made no difference whatsoever. TelstraClear changed their plans, so it was a free upgrade that they made a big deal out of
Same data cap though. I’d much rather a bigger cap than a faster connection.
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Frog: TelstraClear is your secret.
You are one of a minority who have faster internet than ADSL. Your internet comes over cable and offers true high speed both up and down with less sharing of bandwidth with other users in your neighbourhood.
Try out ADSL for a while will you (like the majority of the country has to).
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I had the same trouble with TVNZ a few years ago. As I live in a rural area I could only get TV1, and couldn’t afford SKY at the time. As TV1 is the only channel that is put out for the most coverage it should be a general channel to cater a little for everyone (there are some areas in NZ that can’t even get TV1). There were no kids programmes at all on it (and still aren’t). There should be but TVNZ doesn’t want to know about it,
Frida.
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Graham: ADSL 2, installed by a private company because it makes economic sense for them to do so, is coming. Hang in there
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Do you remember the bad old days of 1OMb lans based on hubs with broadcast storms and what not bringing the lan to a crawl. It could be so bad that saving files to floppy and walking across the office was faster then saving to the server via the network.
There are not that many offices doing multimedia work with huge files that wouldn’t have upgraded to Gigabit ethernet. Most that haven’t would have to copy the huge files to their pc for working on and save them back to the server when they have finished. (There are other advantages for doing things this way anyway, but also disadvantages).
My 10Mb cable internet is slow. When I was on adsl 1024Mb/s plan a few years back, I was getting speeds equivalent to what I have now, with better reliability then too. That was before Telecom and Telstraclear de peered from APX/WIX (the neutral peering exchanges) because they felt they should be paid not only by their customers to connect them to the internet, but also by the local content provider sites to allow their customers to have access to those sites. This means that a good proportion of all our internet traffic gets routed via America for no other reason then making an extra buck.
Remember the impact of the 2005 event where Telecom managed to sever both it’s eastern and Western fibre links resulting in the severing their network across the middle of the north island, causing huge issues with their adsl and email services across the country. Had they been peering, they could have largely mitigated by utilising transit on one of the other networks without too much fuss at all and effectively hidden the effect from their customers, and not looked like absolute idiots.
I’m not a fan of Government intervention, but i think regulation on this score would do a number of things.
1) Reduce the impediments to small time ISP’s, levelling the playing field somewhat.
2) Add significant robustness to the national communications, meaning we’d be in better position to handle national emergencies/disaster communications wise.
3) Remove un-necessary load from the international links.
4) It would reduce the transit costs to all ISP’s, thus enabling large reductions in the cost of internet to the consumers.
5) Reduce the latency and increase the speed between content providers and content consumers, allowing both to fully utilise their existing and future potential speeds.
Fibre to the home would be completely useless unless this issue is addressed first.
Why not put that to Mr Joyce.
More info on this issue can be found here
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Indeed, dir. Peering would make a huge difference
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‘several times’ – ho ho!
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With the state of our rail network (Aussie spending $40 billion in the next decade) and Joyce signalling he will cut the meagre $90 million a year we spend on our system and the state of our electricity network (Aussie is massively investing in Solar and Geothermal) I think a move over the ditch (where you get paid 30% more) is looking quite attractive…
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The australians are also putting in a huge pile of desalination plants. Maybe we should too!
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dlr -
really enjoying your technically competent posts.
Just as an aside, frog came here from overseas, so while your discussions of the past ten years of technical upgrades have impressed me, he’ll be quietly appalled that we festered so long under the conditions we have tolerated, having come from a large urban conurbation (that I won’t name out of fellow feeling for the amphibian).
But I doubt he’s ever had to deal with Teresa-Gattung style repression where he formerly lived. I’m amazed that I stayed here, come to think of it.
I did have information on what was the industry standard overseas in ’99 >, due to two family members travelling to international Telco conferences for their respective firms – arriving home all bouncy & shiny-eyed to describe what they’d seen, then slowly deflating as they realised that it was not going to be implemented here (whether that was GSM networks, high-speed broadband, or any of the other beauties the industry thought up.)
We tend to get the ‘new’ hardware here an iteration or so behind Korea, Japan, Germany, Finland, or any of the other early-adopter R&D countries, so I tend to buy 2nd hand computers these days, ‘cos half the new functions just won’t work here on our networks.
Funniest thing I’ve seen in my life was a former flatmate’s face after he began to use his shiny new i-Touch, bought in Singapore, and discovered that the peripherals that he had decided not to buy duty-free in Singapore wouldn’t arrive here for another 3 months, even if they came into the country that year. There was much geeky wailing and gnashing of teeth before he subsided enough to whine on his blog…
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frog:
Woosh was (as I read it, deliberately) incompatible with xnet, last time my normal ISP caused me grief, else I’d be with them by now.
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Bandwidth at a proportion of real cost of delivery and like Austin, Texas, community owned pipes. Integrated and internalised benefits that is scalar to high end needs and that reduces per bit costs to low end consumers.
I would recommend investing in anything or anyone who owns operates builds and fixes… bio-fueled ditch witches.
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frog,
No matter how fast it is, it will never be fast enough. That’s the way of the world. You’re absolutely right that there is no need for faster broadband, but this isn’t driven by need, it’s driven by want.
It’s completely pointless.
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The lack of local peering is an anti-feature that set’s up as an artificial barrier thats maintain the duopoly control over digital communications.
I have no beef over the government wanting to spend money on improving broadband speed and access. But I do think where the money goes is too much driven by pressure from the duopoly wanting to maintain their control of the market rather than industry best practice and the benefit of the consumer.
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Blair – can you repeat that using more English? I don’t think I understood a single sentence.
Trevor.
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rimu – Geoffrey Palmer described New Zealand as a very pluvial country. Instead of installing desalination plants, we could ship fresh water to Australia. Our problem is more that the rain comes in bursts and isn’t evenly distributed. Perhaps we should also ship fresh water around the country or pipe it around…
Perhaps we should be developing sail-powered tankers.
Trevor.
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With cabinetisation taking place, it won’t be necessary to have fibre to each home to achieve higher up and down speeds. Fibre to the cabinets is fine, and speeds will increase as the cabinets get placed closer to each home, over the normal buried copper cables.
Trevor.
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Some blog responses
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2010/02/greens_on_fibre.html
http://tumeke.blogspot.com/2010/02/green-party-technospastic-luddites.html
Some of the comments on those posts are interesting or generally supportive of what I have said. However, many tend to accuse the Greens of some sort of blind environmental religion, not realising that their rationalisations of why we ‘need’ fibre to the home are based on their own religion of ‘progress’. Ironic. And predictable.
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ADSL 2+ is already in most urban locations. I get 17Mbps download at home for example. The issue is that it is not symmetric, and my upload speed is only 512kbps. That causes some issues for certain services, like high def video conferencing which requires symmetric bandwidth of around 1Mbps. Telstra cable can be symmetric, although I believe you have to pay a bit more to get higher upload speeds.
It’s a field of dreams scenario though, build it and they (high bandwidth applications) will come. The sooner it is built the sooner it will be utilised.
Regarding international bandwidth, while ISP’s make a margin they are not actually charging exorbitant prices for it. If that was the case you would see at least one player in the market undercutting the others substantially. As it is we have one cable, and that is why our international bandwidth is more expensive than say in the USA. We don’t really have the demand to support a second cable either. Someone has to sink a large investment into it, and the return on that can only be assured if international bandwidth pricing remains high for several years into the future. So even a second cable won’t signal a step change in international pricing. On the plus side, the threat of a second cable usually triggers a price drop from the existing provider (to make the ROI less realistic for the new cable and stave off the competition).
Face it, we’re at the end of the world with a single cable, expecting our internet pricing to match that in the US or Europe is not realistic.
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I really think this post is one that should never have been.
We can cache a lot more, and that would help with the overseas bandwidth limitations, which do not go away entirely but which CAN be ameliorated.
The cost of the international connections should NOT dictate to my cap when I am connected to a server in Auckland, or to some corporate in Wellington… and when I am working on those machines, faster IS better.
The infrastructure is not robust with respect to several inevitable disasters.
Imagine being able to source movies and TV over the net, from servers that are local in NZ? Simply caching a program or movie from overseas here means that it gets to traverse that cable one time and can then be enjoyed by the rest of us… but we can’t do that because we have data caps AND we have bandwidth limitations.
I’ve grown accustomed to the pain, but I am well aware that I am being hurt by the way the internet works here. A decade ago (in LA) I had ONE fiber-optic to my house, faster net, cable TV over the same cable, phone over the same cable and no data caps.
We have cr@p and it COULD be better. We don’t have the bandwidth to make it better. There is a point where that incremental change to make things faster becomes a qualitative difference to make things POSSIBLE and that is something we are missing out on.
As for the pricing… the data caps hurt us. The rest is in the noise.
respectfully
BJ
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I am not sure how much the international cable limits home users. My impression is that there are also other bottle necks between that cable and my local exchange, as I have had quite slow web page updates accessing my web-based email or news sites – both provided by my ISP. Being in the South Island probably doesn’t help. Having the two peering exchanges in the North Island only probably doesn’t help either.
Trevor.
PS: The need for access speed wouldn’t be such an issue if there weren’t so many adds with high graphical content on some of the web pages I access
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I came across a suggestion that the next trans-Tasman fibre optic cable should come ashore at Invercargill. This would give redundancy should any of the links along the length of the country fail, and presumably would reduce some of the load on those links as well. Any thoughts?
Trevor.
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Seems the attraction of a piece of that $1.5 billion is too much for some companies:
http://www.fibretothedoor.co.nz/
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This is exciting http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/newsdetail1.asp?storyID=172294
If anyone in NZ can pull this off, it’s Rod Drury and Sam Morgan. If this goes ahead, then my 4th point in the original post will be dealt with.
There has been talk along these lines for yeeears though, so I’m not holding my breath.
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$300 million on getting rural broadband up to 5 Mbps. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10632350
That’s money well spent, IMO
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This report is even better:
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/6937894/broadband-roll-out-for-rural-communities/
It claims 97% of rural homes will get 5 Megabytes per second – that is 40Mbps. That sounds too good to be true – and probably isn’t.
Trevor.
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But Telecom says it will cost them:
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/6941851/broadband-plan-bothers-telecom/
Trevor.
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Shock! Horror! The Greens are in agreement with Federated Farmers on an issue?
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/6941812/farmers-want-more-money-for-rural-broadband/
Trevor.
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I know Trevor. As our spokesperson now on Rural Affairs, Regional Economic Development, Agriculture and Biosecurity (and Customs, let’s not forget that) it’s great that there are some issues where we have a common view. In fact I think it’s important to work together on some issues where we agree – it means we’re more likely to make headway on those, but also gives added weight to our perspective when we disagree.
On rural broadband the Feds’ view is mostly an economic one. While I think that’s important, my own thinking about rural broadband is that it is crucially important for creating the kind of distributed economy (and everything else) that we will need in the future, and for meeting the citizenship rights of rural-dwellers. The other really important ally here, who shouldn’t be overlooked, is Rural Women – a great organisation with a lot of thinking congruent with our own.
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From the Large Herds Conference in Invercargill, as reported in today’s Southland Times, under the heading:
Perception of farmers disputed
Farmer Mike Horgan said:
“Dairy farmers spilling cow effluent were seen by the public as more of a threat to society than drink-drivers or murderers”.
He goes on … “There seems to be a consensus across our nation that a dairy farmer spilling a little biodegradable effluent is far more of a threat to society than a drunk driver or murderer”.
And..
“To date, despite cow numbers constantly on the increase, water quality has changed little, if at all, in that eight-year period”.
The man’s a loon.
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Kevin, what do you mean by “distributed economy” and why is broadband “crucially important” for that?
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None of the measures listed by Frog in the original posting (including fibre to the home) will address my biggest complaint – slow downloads from sites within New Zealand, such as banks, my ISP’s mail server(!) and even blog.greens.org.nz.
What is going on? Are the data cables running up and down the country saturated? Is there insufficient router power at the various nodes? Are the caches overloaded? Fast connections from home to the exchange and fast connections from New Zealand won’t speed anything up if the data is held up between the local exchange and the international cable(s).
Trevor.
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ACT are looking out for Telecom’s interests:
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/6955411/act-opposes-broadband-levy-plan/
Trevor.
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There is new life in twisted pair (copper wires) yet:
http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/25158/?nlid=2921&a=f
“It can reach speeds of 300 megabits per second at a distance of 400 meters from a communications hub, and 100 megabits per second at one kilometer.”
Fibre to the local cabinet if that cabinet is within 1km of the home will do nicely thank you.
Trevor.
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If New Zealand ever gets another overseas cable, there is a suggestion that it should terminate in Invercargill, to provide a redundant path should any of the cables between Invercargill and Warkworth fail.
Power is cheap down south, near much of our hydro generation and there are useful wind and wave resources down there too. Server farms take a lot of energy. Just think what Google’s electricity bill must be like.
So here is an idea:
Install the overseas cable to Invercargill, and strengthen the cable network from Invercargill to the existing Southern Cross cable. Then set up server farms where they have good access to the undersea cable and the internal cables and cheap electricity, and offer hosting of web sites and mirrors, and data processing services (think Weta Workshops) to overseas companies (and universities). Effectively this allows us to sell our cheap electricity overseas without having to pay high shipping costs.
Trevor.
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Do we even need ultra-fast broadband? asks NZHerald’s Brian Fallow.
This is going to be a major embarrassment for National, you mark my words. It will probably take a long time of the investment not paying off before people realise, though
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More at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/09/cheap_broadband.html
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Frog
I am not agreeing completely here. Working from home in the IT sector saves an immense amount of petrol and pollution. It isn’t, to be sure, clear that we are going to manage this properly but Trevor’s notion of using local server farms to handle a larger internet footprint for the country has some merit. It could deliver the net to NZ with a smaller impact in terms of undersea cable bandwidth as well. Using fiber for most communications overcomes the large risk to telecommunications posed by solar storms as well. Insurance. The date for the next one is not known, but the impact of something similar to what happened in the late 1800′s (induced currents blowing stuff up) would be catastrophic to copper systems. Note the risk imposed on the network of high-voltage lines as opposed to arranging smaller scale generation as well.
It can work for us. I doubt it will be as important as National thinks, but I doubt it will be an embarrassment, and I DO think that when the storm hits, the infrastructure will be more reliable for it being in place…. if it is.
Mindful of the fact that it isn’t built yet.
respectfully
BJ
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