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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Where the hell did you get 100-200Mbit fibre? We had a fibre connection at work for our data centres in Wellington and I still felt the connection wasn't all that great (mostly the limit of the undersea fibre cables to Australia/US Pacific).

Even people I knew on TelecomNZ/Spark fibre didn't have the greatest connection speeds (They were decent I guess, but not what I'd consider fibre at all).

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100/200/1GB is common now with UFB in NZ, and apartments/offces in the the CBDs are getting sorted. And dark fibre to DCs is available too. Heck - Trade Me was on the Wellington fibre loop back in the early 2000s.

International connections are up to the ISP - and those prices have dropped sharply over the years.

The main cost remains the last mile, and while plenty of money is there to be made from international (I was a Pacific Fibre founder - we tried, and a director of an ISP that can rapidly hook up connections from DCs to AWS etc) that's not really holding us back for most uses.

It was common as anything in Christchurch, most of my friends had between 40 and 500Mbit at home either on fibre (up to 1Gbit to the home at the time back in 2011), VDSL (I think up to 200Mbit if you're close to the exchange back then) or the old Cable network which was 100Mbit.

At my work we had two 1Gbit internet links at our primary site and anywhere from 1Gbit down to 50Mbit~ way out in rural areas and we had between 500Mbit and 10Gbit dark fibre between sites.

*Update: Just called an old mate still back in Christchurch, he's on 500Mbit fibre but he said that most people he knows are still on around 100Mbit.

Here's some pricing: http://ufb.org.nz/pricing-plans/

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