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Comment by chadgeidel | Hacker News Reader

The Internet connectivity issue was the big deal-breaker for me. Australian bloggers have been complaining about it since the beginning of the WWW. Apparently there's one provider and they don't care about anything beyond "email and casual browsing". I've heard that Australia and New Zealand share the same ISP and the same policies.

This is going to be a huge hinderance for any tech enterprise.

I'm glad to see @bspn (sibling comment here) say that the Internet quality is improving.

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Uncapped gigabit fibre is now available to a significant and growing portion of our population, and in almost all circumstances you have 10+ ISPs to choose from. None of these local monopolies that America seems to suffer from.

We used to be an internet backwater, lagging behind Australia and far behind Europe/USA, but in the last 10 years we've really leapt into the 21st century.

Case in point: http://www.speedtest.net/result/6217789165.png

Good to know, thanks!

That's to local .au servers. What is it like to the US? I think you can select a country with Speedtest.

I normally get full speed to the US. Single connections hurt because of the latency, but the capacity is there.

The main issue was the monopoly on transit, but domestic competition has helped a bit.

yes I have gigabit fibre (in Dunedin), uncapped - I get close to full speed to local speedtest servers - but sadly only ~100Mb offshore to the US - 'sadly' because 100Mb is plenty for almost everything .... the big issue though is latency - speed of light and router delays across the Pacific

Australian internet is leagues behind NZ internet. NZ reliably has fibre in most places in the cities, and a plan to get fibre to 80% of the population by 2020 (FTTB). This is in contrast to the botched Australian plan (search for NBN) which targets FTTN. In NZ there's also plenty of good, reliable fast public wifi (especially if you have a Spark mobile plan).

A few others have pointed it out already, but you're quite misinformed (not uncommon, most Australians assume NZ has worse internet connectivity).

NZ has a nationwide copper network owned by NZX listed company Chorus, and there is a gigabit fibre network nearing completion (Chorus and about 3 other companies). Network owners are prohibited from retailing and must provide retail ISPs access on fair terms (wholesale pricing is regulated).

There are a few Australian owned ISPs, but none that operate in both Australia and NZ.

> I've heard that Australia and New Zealand share the same ISP

What? Hell no. The only Australian ISP that tried to set-up here (Telstra) ended up selling out to Vodafone and exiting the market. Our internet is far better than Australia's.

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