75% of New Zealanders to get 100Mbps fiber by 2020 | Hacker News Reader

75% of New Zealanders to get 100Mbps fiber by 2020

arstechnica.com

18 pointsMikeCapone27 comments

So, I don't think that's so unlikely for the United States - hear me out ;-). 2020 is 10 years away. By the end of this year, around a third of Americans will be covered by 4G technologies. 4G technologies (in order to be considered such) must have a theoretical peak exceeding 100Mbps for mobile usage and 1Gbps for fixed usage (ie. home broadband). Now, initially, these 4G technologies won't get anywhere near those speeds. It will be very much like 3G where 300-400kbps was the norm, but now 1Mbps is more the norm.

When talking about what people see in the real world from these theoretical peaks, we can look at Verizon and Sprint who are offering a theoretical peak of 3.1Mbps and AT&T who is offering a theoretical peak of 7.2Mbps. In real life, tests show:

            Sprint  Verizon  AT&T
  PCMag     0.99M   1.01M    1.79M
  PCWorld   0.8M    0.88M    1.41M
  Gizmodo   ~0.9M   ~1.3M    ~1.4M

With that data in hand, it looks like average real-world speeds come out to about 28% of peak theoretical speeds. If that holds true in the 4G era, that would be 280Mbps of real-world speed wirelessly. Even if they only achieve 10% of 5% of their theoretical peak, that's still 100Mbps or 50Mbps (and I think that 5% is being very conservative).

Now, that is clearly years away. What wireless companies will be pushing in 2012 will likely be in the 10Mbps range for mobile devices. However, I think it's reasonable that we might see 100Mbps broadband to more than 75% of the American population by 2020. Some companies like Clearwire are counting on home broadband as an important source of revenue. As customers start getting increased choice in home broadband (likely from 2 or more wireless providers), cable companies and local telcos will have to enhance their offerings to stay competitive (or maybe the economics is such that wireless makes more sense given American geography).

2020 is a long time away. 4G wireless technology is exciting and is promising to reach very high speeds for fixed wireless. Wireless companies are much more competitive than telcos and cable companies with most Americans having the choice between at least 4 (and MetroPCS has been coming on strong in many urban areas to create a fifth). Companies like Sprint/Clearwire are even thinking about making their own microwave backhauls which would eliminate a huge cost in network rollout (fiber to the site). There's a good decade for 4G to really ratchet up the speeds before 2020 is here. I'm hopeful. At the very least, the competition will give a swift kick in the pants to wired providers.

Do Kiwis even have >100Mbps leaving New Zealand? :(

I wouldn't count your Mbps before they hatch.

The australian plan was announced in a somewhat similar fashion. The original estimate soon blew out to 40 billion dollars. The government admits that they don't have the money, and that there will be no commercial return for at least 20-30 years. They, so far, have spent $17 million dollars in studies and reports by consultants, and have delievered a pitifully low amount of Broadband to Tasmania, the smallest (by an order of 10) state (think Rhode Island vs Alaska). Already it is covered in scandals and rorts, the head of the project gets a $400k salary and is an ex-union hack who was given the job on the basis of being friends with the minister responsible. The main opposition party has promised to scrap the entire project for fiscal responsibility reasons and turn the market back over to private competitors, with government backing for rural areas, as was the original plan. The opposition are currently polling better than the government with under 6 months to go to the election. I think it is fair to say that the National Broadband Scheme in Australia is a dead project walking. Thankfully the overturn of the government will also spell the death of the proposed internet filter.

These projects sound good in theory but are terrible in execution because Governments just cannot understand commercial returns, and as such are a giant sink hole of money and rorting. It's like the Concorde : neat idea and great tech, but an absolute financial disaster area.

>The government admits that they don't have the money

As with all large government infrastructure projects, the government will borrow money to fund development. This isn't a problem considering that Australia has the lowest public debt of any Western country, and net debt will peak at 6% of GDP in 2012.

>I think it is fair to say that the National Broadband Scheme in Australia is a dead project walking.

Centrebet 2010 Australian Federal Election

Labor $1.46

Coalition $2.65

It's likely that Labor will win the next election and continue with its plan to build a national broadband network.

>These projects sound good in theory but are terrible in execution because Governments just cannot understand commercial returns

I would say that China is an example of a Government that's been able to roll out a significant amount of infrastructure in a small amount of time.

We'll have gigabit fiber by then. 100mps will be wireless.

Think back 10 years. How far have we come in a decade?

I think 10 years ago, the best I got was GPRS data on tmobile on my cell, but it was uncapped! I had a high end "gold" orinoco 802.11b card that only worked at 2 places on campus. I also bought a new low-end laptop that year, a Dell 366Mhz celeron -- cost me $2000 and I worked all summer to save that much.

Yup, complete with 20gb bandwidth caps because we only have the one pipe out of the country.

I don't understand why NZ doesn't build another pipe or two.

The Pacific Fibre guys are trying to do just that, as another poster mentioned.

Telecom NZ is of the mindset that bandwidth is a scarce resource that will run out and needs the maximum revenue extracted from it (yet never to be upgraded, capacity wise).

Which ironically leads to half of Southern Cross capacity lying fallow because their prices are too high.

Pacific Fibre cannot come soon enough, and when they do, Telecom cannot die fast enough.

My boss is one of the people behind the Pacific Fibre project. I can't wait, but it's still a few years away. NZ is stuck in the position of having a fair amount of international bandwidth and plenty within the country, but usage is hamstrung by unrealistic data caps. (20GB is the common premium plan for heavy users). With caps like that large-volume applications like IP-TV have been very slow to catch on, although the TelecomNZ-Tivo partnership is changing that, albeit only because TelecomNZ doesn't count that data when working out your usage.

You do have 2 pipes - one to Sydney and one to Hawaii.

Here they are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cross_Cable

Technically you're right, but they're both operated by the same company, so we get screwed over with their pricing.

Hopefully the plan also includes beefing up the connections to the outside by 2020.

just for the record there is this new high capacity link in the works.. http://www.pacificfibre.net/ it's looking for govt funding (and pretty well backed privately) but not a govt project as I understand

I'm really hoping they get off the ground, their mentality is the right one ("please drive demand to us so we can keep on upgrading capacity").

If/when Pacific Fibre happens, I'd like to move at least 50% time to NZ.

with 72% of population in 16 main urban centres, I hope there's some emphasis on rural locations too.

hm, 16 metro areas growing from 72% to 75% of the population in the next 10 years... sounds like that would explain how they decided on 75%.

yay .. except I have '40Mbps' now which works fine as long as I connect to a server here in NZ. Soon as its offshore (ie just about anything on the net) I'm back to nasty old half meg connections. I can barely stream the daily show.

I far prefer the experience of a 2Mbps connection when traveling in NYC to the sorry ass excuse for '40Mbps' I have at home in NZ.

That's nothing. I predict 80% of humans will have 1 Tbps fiber by 2060. I have it on good authority. From the same man who stepped out of a Time Machine as the one who gave them their New Zealand numbers.

The only unfortunate point is that its a government project.

The fibre is being built by private companies operating under carefully designed govt subsidy. The main reason Govt exists is to provide services that benefit the whole country but are too "big" for the market to provide, or lack direct short term benefits.

Fiber is a great place for the govt to help.

I don't think you understand how things work down here.

- The current government will build this at a cost to the taxpayer of (say) $300m. - The next government will sell it for $100m to raise some cash and create an effective monopoly owned by one party with a verbal contract not to screw everyone over, at least not initially. - The government after that, under pressure due to the relentless screwing of NZers by the monopoly company, will buy back the network for $600m. - The new state-owned company will hire consultants for $50m to design a new logo. The logo will resemble a puppy shitting on a Rolex. - Due to ineffective management, the company will be split up into chunks and sold for a fraction of the original cost. The chunks will immediately merge into a monopoly.

haha, this is brilliant. I believe its called Corporatism? Its not quite socialism, because well like you said it'll be owned privately at some point. And its not quite capitalism, well because the government will own it at some point.

The only defying factor of all of this is that in every transaction inevitably the same people will be involved making money off your money. Sometimes they'll be in government and other times they'll be in the 'private' sector.

We did it with our rail network.

Seriously, that's TEN YEARS from now. I had a 100Mpbs up and down connection almost TEN YEARS AGO. It surprises me to no end how backwards some countries are.

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