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Comment by mwilcox | Hacker News Reader

Yup, complete with 20gb bandwidth caps because we only have the one pipe out of the country.

I don't understand why NZ doesn't build another pipe or two.

The Pacific Fibre guys are trying to do just that, as another poster mentioned.

Telecom NZ is of the mindset that bandwidth is a scarce resource that will run out and needs the maximum revenue extracted from it (yet never to be upgraded, capacity wise).

Which ironically leads to half of Southern Cross capacity lying fallow because their prices are too high.

Pacific Fibre cannot come soon enough, and when they do, Telecom cannot die fast enough.

My boss is one of the people behind the Pacific Fibre project. I can't wait, but it's still a few years away. NZ is stuck in the position of having a fair amount of international bandwidth and plenty within the country, but usage is hamstrung by unrealistic data caps. (20GB is the common premium plan for heavy users). With caps like that large-volume applications like IP-TV have been very slow to catch on, although the TelecomNZ-Tivo partnership is changing that, albeit only because TelecomNZ doesn't count that data when working out your usage.

Hopefully the plan also includes beefing up the connections to the outside by 2020.

just for the record there is this new high capacity link in the works.. http://www.pacificfibre.net/ it's looking for govt funding (and pretty well backed privately) but not a govt project as I understand

I'm really hoping they get off the ground, their mentality is the right one ("please drive demand to us so we can keep on upgrading capacity").

If/when Pacific Fibre happens, I'd like to move at least 50% time to NZ.

You do have 2 pipes - one to Sydney and one to Hawaii.

Here they are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cross_Cable

Technically you're right, but they're both operated by the same company, so we get screwed over with their pricing.

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