Worldwide Mac: getting online in New Zealand

Move to the UK. Our Virgin Media cable package (fibre optic) costs us less than £50/month (around US$80) with a little loyalty discount. For that we get 10Mb broadband (uncapped but fair use), phone (unlimited national evening and weekend calls) and 300-channel cable TV. For an upgrade of £12 (US$20) I can get 20Mb broadband). For an extra £15 (US$25) on top of that I can get 50Mb broadband. Cool - and it avoids the dreaded British Telecom.

Just complying with internationalization and localization standards are not enough if you want to provide a truely global service. Here in the U.S., vendors use as much bandwidth as is made available to them. As it increased, so did the consumption of bandwidth. New Zealand is where we were back in the early days of the internet. Being near the top of the heap in bandwidth makes us less accessible in most countries. Sure the "easy globalization" countries have vast amounts of bandwidth as well, but most countries dont. It boils down to whether we really want to be competitive in every country, or just the G8.

Protocols create economic geographies. Every technology you add to your website creates a walled space. Those technologies sit on a stack of enabling technologies each creating its own walled space. Each of those technologies have their own particular reach. Each enable and constrain. Much like the HTML DOM, you have objects within objects, spaces within spaces. Your users are deep inside these contextualizing spaces. How will you reach them?

In the early days of SGML, you tagged content to overcome the wide spread of output bit densities. Your content might show up on a teletype or a 23,000 dpi lithographically printed sheet of paper. SGML sublimated the bit density problem.

Likewise, CSS and browser standards, which still remain with their quirks. So we struggle onward with the same issue embodied in a different context.

As designers and programmers rush forward to the cool and interesting technologies, the old is forgotten. It remains in the stack. It is forgotten in practice. It so easy to ignore the speed limit laws that used to apply. It is easy to forget that we are riding a waves that have not yet reached distant shores.

To truely go global, get each technological space their own server, and code to the standards of that space. Being there is more than getting there.

If you turn your router off just before you hit your cap Vodafone will give you up to 2 weeks of free bandwidth. I get around 6.5Mb/s down and 1 up so you just have a crap line.

tell me about it. i come from what you'd call a "developing country" and the internet is a lot better and faster. not to mention no caps.

i remember i signed up with telecom and my first bill was $1100. are you joking? (to be fair the usage was like 50gb on a 20gb plan and i think $800+ on that was the extra data charge?)

We are also considering moving to the NZ (love the country and the people) and if I were a kiwi, I'd find the current state of NZ internet quite embarrasing. My opinion would apply to any other country with similar situation so no offence to kiwis or NZ, we still love you even if we have to go 10 years backwards with our internet needs ;-)

This is 2009 and in any major city one should have adsl2+ access available at reasonable speeds. If there's cable network, a 10+ Mbit/s service should be available with plans to go for 100+ Mbit/s (if not yet available). Fiber to the home is nice and should be made possible to any new housing area.

The internet service should simply be non-capped. There are appliances out there that will automatically throttle or cut customers who abuse the T&C with their p2p traffic.

I don't buy the reasons that much; there are plenty of countries with similar population with decent internet access. The location I can sort-of agree with but there's a few submarine cables out there and upgrading the capacity of those fibers shouldn't be totally out of the question.

I think the NZ government should first invest money in getting the international capacity to where it should be in 2009 (if that's the problem) and start a trend of uncapped access services. Getting fiber to the homes would be the next priority when the groundwork is done. Fiber at home is useless if you're capped at some low amount of traffic.

The very same is true with 3G data access (usb dongles, smartphones, built-in in laptops, ...). As long as you have per megabyte pricing, it's a niche product. The change will happen when you introduce flat rate.

I wouldn't look at the amount of time spent on-line statistics. It's good that it's low as people spend the time doing something more useful like enjoying the amazing nature of NZ. But still it doesn't mean I don't want to have a decent internet access when I need it, for pleasure or work.

PS. Anyone interested to share experiences about moving to NZ / planning to move to NZ, don't hesitate to drop a line at ojala at iki.fi

As an ex-pat kiwi iPhone developer contemplating a return to the motherland this is kind of dissappointing news :(
The cost and speed here in Australia sucks big time too so it's a tough call.
Maybe as 69% of our business on itunes orginates from the states we should seriously consider a move stateside ;)

w.whatford for Collect3
Picture Safe, Video Safe, Boxee Remote.

Internet is very much YMMV in NZ. Where I live we have TelstraClear available. We have an 80GB 10MBPS+ phone line plan. Sometimes we go over our 80GB but most months we get to about 76-78GB.

You might gain a little extra bandwidth by only downloading the updates once (if it's not specific to your computer), instead of downloading them each time for each mac. Just launch Software Update and then in the "Update" Menu, select "Install and Keep Package". That way you can transfer the update to the other mac by dropping it to its shared folder (if you have sharing turned on) or transferring it via a USB stick. It's a little bit extra work, but it's worth the episode of 30 Rock that you can transfer without hitting your cap.
Nice picture by the way. Is that your back garden?

I sense a business opportunity there. :)

Yet another reason to flee to the Cleve.