For days, well, over a week, even, I've been wondering what it was going to take to snap me out of my blogging slumber. It turns out that it was a classically-Monday infotech story on Stuff.
Broadband woes media beat-up - analyst
The research arm of Australian broker Macquarie Equities has gone in to bat for Telecom, accusing the media of a beat-up over New Zealand's broadband performance.
Well well well. I can't even be biffed doing the decent thing investigating this story any deeper, but as far as I'm concerned, the research arm of Australian broker Macquarie Equities can suck a cock. New Zealand's performance relative to Australia is irrelevant to the debate, and the issue is not, as Macquarie go to pains to point out, speed; rather the horrendous prices we are forced to pay, and the ridiculous caps that are placed on our monthly traffic.
Fuck Australia; fuck Macquarie; fuck 24Mbps, or even 3.5Mbps; I'd happily take a 256 Kbps connection for 100% of the time, if I wasn't paying through the nose for the privilege, and had to gear down to approximately dialup speed after the cap is reached. Anyway, the day when I can use much more than about 50Kbps, or even have data served up at anything like that rate - due to load on servers and networks the world over - is surely some way off.
New Zealand's broadband services regularly make me the laughing-stock of the various online communities I belong to; quite frankly, it's becoming tedious.
If you're interested in reading further about this, I can almost guarantee - without even checking - that Russell Brown has written about it at length, and without a single cussword. Wanna put a fiver on it?
2 comments:
That would be a silly bet: RB got to it yesterday morning. And no cuss words (unless you count "contention ratio", which I'm sure Tze Ming could turn into an obscenity).
I felt the same vitriol reading another article in this morning's DomPost - this one from the head of the Business Roundtable (whaddya think? Could they possibly be in bed with Telecom?) where he suggests that in order to increase broadband uptake NZ needs to raise average incomes.
WTF?
It's not that I can't afford to pay double what I currently pay for my dialup connection ($15/month) for "broadband" - it's that I wouldn't actually be getting broadband (as per Stephen's main post). 256KB/s ain't broadband.
But it's the data cap that bugs me the most... so after I use my 1 Gig of traffic (or 10GB, or whatever) then I get reduced to dialup speeds.
So why bother?
As for the chairman's closing statement that NZ now has a "competitive private [telecoms] industry" - really? So who can I get to provide a POTS connection to my house? Telecom? TelstraClear? I guess that's all of two competitors (Oh, hang on, TelstraClear will be using Telecom's twisted-pair).
I'm beginning to think wireless providers may be the only way to go in the future. At least Cafenet are expanding and doing good work...
</rant>
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