I'm glad it finally happened in NZ and as you say, it's awesome. I'm rocking 1000/500 - the biggest limitation is international throughput and latency which I suppose they are working on and improving all the time.
I remember reading years ago about interesting research being done to use photonic-bandgap rims to make fibers that would allow propagation approaching vacuum speed [2], and if deployed eventually that could drop latency by another 40-60ms. But at least back then there seemed to be enough loss (3.5 dB/km) that it'd be impractical over long distances without excessive boosters, even ignoring any cost/durability issues of the fiber itself. That may have been improved in the last 4 years though, but I'm not sure if it ever did make it to market (or if there are even plans still in progress for it, raw throughput was impressive too FWIW).
At any rate: the NZ ISPs seem to be offering pretty solid service on that front even internationally, at least in terms of pure latency. If there is increasing congestion or other issues those are just matters of capex, and between the ISP's servers and premise links there might be more lag being added in. But I don't see any glaring core inefficiencies there in terms of the international link part, unless I'm missing something entirely. Looks a lot better then I'd have expected taking a guess based on how it was a decade ago.
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1: https://truenet.nz/international-latency
2: "Towards high-capacity fibre-optic communications at the speed of light in vacuum": https://www.nature.com/articles/nphoton.2013.45 (DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2013.45)
However, I feel like `pacman -Syu` should be faster. I don't mind the latency, but the throughput should be better right? I only get 1-2 Mbyte/s average using US servers.
It's interesting to note that the compromises made with UFB would not fly in the U.S. Liberals would kill it as a handout to rich people ("if you can't afford to feed your family by the end of the month, you can't afford $75 a month for the broadband service")[1] and conservatives would kill it because it's not available more than 50 km from an urban area.
[1] http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140219/TECHNOLOGY/140...
Vodafone currently offer 200Mbps unlimited data fibre (don't know what the upload speed is) for $110/month, and unlimited speed (up to 900Mbps, depending on location) for $120/month, and deduct $10/month if you go on a contract.
It's only in the last couple years that you can get unlimited data at a reasonable price here.
A large fraction of the cost of bandwidth in NZ is international transit, because there's only one significant undersea cable connecting NZ, the Southern Cross Cable. I couldn't find current prices, but in 2013 it cost about US$0.10/GB to go through that cable [1]