Kiwi entrepreneurs announce international cable for New Zealand and Australia | Hacker News Reader

Kiwi entrepreneurs announce international cable for New Zealand and Australia

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24 pointsNZ_Matt6 comments

This is great news! At the moment, the Southern Cross cable (which is half owned by New Zealand's incumbent telco) is essentially the country's only link to the rest of the Internet. They therefore charge monopoly rents.

I can't find the reference right now, but I recall that a couple years ago a 155mbit/sec link between NZ and California would cost well in excess of NZ$1,000,000 _per annum_. That link running at 100% capacity 24/7 has a capacity to transfer roughly 500,000 GB per year -- meaning the cost to an ISP in New Zealand was (and certainly is still close to) NZ$2.00 per GB of data. It's no wonder that broadband there is slow, expensive, and has very limited data caps.

And of course Sam Morgan and Stephen Tindall have the cash and the clout to make this happen. Good on them for stepping up to the plate and tackling the incumbents!

It is good news but I'm not sure they have the cash. Tindell (520m) and Morgan (250m) combined have approximately 770m (using 2007 rich list numbers which could be way off, but for arguments sake...) This falls quite short of the 900m they are estimating - even if they both pushed their whole stack.

My guess - scare some incumbents (you reckon Telecom wouldn't stump up coin to own part of their only competitor when they're trying to raise cash?), get some money from Govt because of their names, and then chip some in personally along with some of their friends cash.

Not saying I don't wish this would happen - just saying what they're trying to achieve will be hard and they will need A LOT of help.

Investors usually don't start big projects using all of their own coin. THey'll usually put something like 30-40% to get the ball rolling. It acts as a catalyst for other investors to join in. They'll probably get the remaining 60% through private investors, hedge funds, and the government.

Between the 2 of them they have more than enough money to see this project through. Since there is only one other competitor and plenty of demand this is as sure a bet as you're going to get.

This is huge news for New Zealand, and I hope they can push it through.

NZ really is hampered by their external infrastructure. I lived in Wellington for 2 years. Offshore speeds were horribly slow, domestic speeds better. Downloading a 1GB demo from Xbox Live Marketplace took a day on the fastest DSL connection I could get (plus burnt through a large chunk of my download cap that month). It takes me less than an hour in California.

The university was charging students per MB, which I hope is a policy that has since been rescinded.

The cruel irony is that New Zealand's brightest new economy is largely on the net; some of their programmers and designers are the best you'll find anywhere.

Things are somewhat better, but far from the speeds we see in the more developed parts of Asia. I'm in Wellington, and get 3.5 M.bits/second downstream, with a 50 GB monthly usage cap.

It's good to note that Wellington is probably the best connected city in New Zealand.

There is fibre around the Wellington CBD, and it extends outwards to some residential. There's also a cable TV offering.

The rest of the country has to put up with ADSL and Wifi links... though things may have improved in my 2 years away from home.

The entrepreneurs behind it are a good team; I've worked with Rod Drury for a couple of years at his startup, so I know this was something they've pitched national government before. It will be interesting to see what sort of public help they get with the endeavor.

New Zealand has traditionally been a leader in internet uptake - see the BBC's recent data visualisation http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8552410.stm The initial uptake was all dialup, however, and we've been left behind in the push to broadband because of a local monopoly/duopoly.

I hope this cable goes through - I may consider returning home one day :)

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