Hacker News Reader

Comment by PartTimeZombie | Hacker News Reader

We started the same thing here in New Zealand. I was a bit outraged when $1.2 billion of taxpayers money was handed out to build a national fibre network, but it's turning out not too bad. Not perfect, but not bad either. It helps that the opposition bought in, despite disagreeing on details.

View on HN

Why were you outraged that your government invested $1.2 billion in a significant upgrade of an important piece of infrastructure, beneficial for citizens and companies, now and in the future? Was it because you've jumped on the anti-government train that's so popular right now, like the overused term "taxpayers money" suggests, or did you really believe that building a national fibre network was the dumbest idea ever?

Considering the population of New Zealand, that's a bill of around $255 per person. Perhaps they think the money could have been better spent?

$255 sounds extremely reasonable. That's much less than what most people pay annually for service.

I would happily pay a one time cost of $255 to run fiber to my house. I'd even be willing to pay $500 to run fiber to my house. Sadly around here if I want fiber to my house, even assuming I could find an ISP willing to run it, it would probably cost me upwards of $2000 to have it run, and probably significantly more than that. That's also not counting the cost of actually getting service, that's just the "installation fee" to have it run.

He said per person, not per household - not the same unless you're living alone. Also this doesn't make your internet free you have to pay for the service on top of that.

And believe it or not a lot of people don't care about having fiber internet available.

Once installed, fiber optic lines become long term infrastructure, and will be used for decades. With those time scales in mind, the line installation cost is reasonable even after accounting for market penetration and occupancy rates.

But only a quarter of the people who have access are using the service so far.

> with fibre available to 1,006,741 users, of which 240,525 have signed up

And the goal is to cover 75% of the population (1,340,000 households).

So it's around $1000/household. And of those households the majority will not be using the service but they'll be paying for it assuming the household pays taxes.

NZ's UFB network has always been FTTH (meaning it terminates inside your house), there is no copper in this picture.

This is why, for example, last month people who qualified for 200MB can now get gigabit plans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com