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Comment by pippy | Hacker News Reader

Being from New Zealand, it hits us kiwis hard. No Netflix. No Hulu. Even when Cartoon Network uploads to YouTube their videos are often unavailable in my country.

So the next best thing is piracy. You can piss around with DNS settings or wait for the DVDs to be available, but piracy is just so much more convenient.

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I'm watching netflix from NZ, bandwidth caps here are killer, netflix scales down to 300kbit and no seeding, so it beats torrenting in a lot of cases for me, but then, I know how to configure a VPN, so I can understand why torrents are super appealing for most.

Also, where is the redbox clone? Quickflix is a joke as a netflix competitor, and there's no redbox clone that I know of. 40GB bandwidth caps? 80 for $100nzd/month? Even piracy is hard at that level.

Bandwidth caps? I pay $130/mo for unlimited data on a fibre connection through Orcon. Even if fibre isn't available yet in your area you can still get a standard broadband connection for $100/mo with unlimited data.

I'm paying $170/mo for 500gb on Telecom fibre. I never seem to go over 300gb even when I try so it suits me. I always see people complaining about international speeds on Orcon unlimited. I can max out 11mb/s with torrents on a Sunday night no problem.

I have Netflix setup as well, super convenient but you never seem to get HD.

With those speeds you might want to try forcing bandwidth, if you haven't already.

ctrl-alt-shift-S brings up a bandwidth selection in the Netflix player.

100 megabits = 12.5 megabytes. Close enough.

I don't solely have fibre just for netflix. I was assuming using a 3rd party dns server to unblock Netflix they are actually proxy'ing some of the content, so it's really their server that limits the download speed (I mostly watch on my Apple TV so not many options there).

I might try that on the desktop version even though I don't use it much.

11mb/s is roughly 100mbits, you don't need $170 fibre for that.

I have the same Telescum account - except it's ADSL not fibre. I get the same D/L speeds :o)

In central ish Auckland, and the fastest I can get is 5Mb. No fibre available. Tried their "unlimited" and it's throttled to hell. Worthless. For about $100 I now have throttled but capped. But on the bright side, fibre may be available in 2019 according to our joke of a minister, Amy, when she emailed me.

Guessing you live in a apartment? Not really much you can do, it's up to the landlord to sort out wiring which probably won't happen unless your building was built with fibre initially.

I live in Ponsonby and we have had fibre available here for over a year now. I thought the plan was to have most of it done by the end of 2015?

House in Onehunga. I've had the data side of things rewired and the cable from the pole on the street is new too. Something is rotten in the street though.

I get twice the speed in Dunedin over ADSL :-{

I feel your pain, bro!

And they think it is expensive here in the UK! That works out to £66.39 here. That's insane.

As a Kiwi expat, prices for internet, and mobile services are amazingly cheaper here in the UK than back in NZ.

There's much more competition here, I'm amazed that I can get unlimited internet on my phone for £12 per month (giffgaff).

Back in NZ my monthly home internet cost the equivalent of £25 with no phoneline (cable - which is rare in NZ), and was capped at 10GB per month. Compared to other services, this was really cheap!

Situation here in India is comparatively good. I use a 100 Gb broadband plan(a decent 50 MBps) for as low as $25. Also above 100 Gb it's unlimited for a lower speed(6 MBps, Unlimited!). Piracy is a lot easier here since services like Netflix are not available and internet is super cheap and fast.

Same in Romania the 1Gbps[1] internet for about £12 and very few legit services like Netflix, Spotify and such.

So guess what's going to happen when you have such an amazing connection.

[1] http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink?t=internet...

Also mention that it is an unlimited data plan, with no caps or additional costs. Yes, that is a 1Gbps connection.

What provider are you using?

Have been trying to avoid piracy for the past few years. Started by buying and then renting dvds from a local dvd rental library. Currently renting movies from youtube seems like an option. Tried Bigflix, a netflix like service but a subscription service doesn't work with a very outdated collection. Youtube seems to get movies after they are approved by cbfc (the hollywood ones,I can see free nigerian movies without a cbfc rating. cbfc is India's movie certification body). This limits the content that is available. No TV content is available. So even with all the Internet bandwidth and some money, I still cannot watch shows which someone in the US can. Things are improving. Many US/UK based series get same week broadcast on TV. But more can be done for the subscription or rental market.

Wonder what causes it? Are they pushing technical costs onto the consumers? Or do they just see a captivate market and most providers are owned outside the country?

If you take a look at this map: http://imgur.com/xLxUs it looks like to buy a connection into/out of NZ there aren't many options - and the cables all look very long, i.e. very expensive.

And a government who supports the main telecom and lines company. There has even been talk of putting some cash their way to compensate for the money they would lose (the dividend they have been paying to date has been good too - but that couldn't be cut of course). This crap from our PM. After screwing us for decades, the commerce commission makes a decision that required a backbone and the PM sides with the corporation rather than the taxpayer. http://i.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/9169753/Chorus-must...

Here's a better link http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

Limited bandwidth coming in, limited bandwidth for the end user.

That's crazy. My entire telecoms bill here in the UK for an unlimited ADSL line, land line and three mobile phones is only £47!

My Verizon bill alone for two phones is $230US

bandwidth caps here are killer

I remain amazed that no ad-hoc network solutions are available. Every wireless device & router should provide at least some off-official-network connectivity. It's not even a hardware problem. Over time, enough overlap should provide a pretty good alternate network service with no caps on bandwidth or content, giving incentive for providing bridges and "unapproved" services. Certainly would have its issues, but would provide more options with almost zero cost.

I have no idea what kind of network you are suggesting.

Every wireless-network device is capable of connecting directly to other wireless devices rather than (or in addition to) just connecting to a router/hub. Imagine every wireless device recursively within range of your device (connected to yours, or connected to another device connected to yours, or ...), all capable of forming an ad-hoc network operating independently of the routers/cell-towers/etc normally used, a wireless network bridging all censorship/control boundaries, operating for free, no way to shut it all down. Insofar as there are limits to its extent, some people would provide gateway points to Internet backbones.

I think you're missing about 4 layers of the OSI stack.

Pardon my lack of encyclopedic thoroughness in a casual discussion.

And I think you're significantly underplaying the technical and financial challenges associated with scaling up a mesh network.

I've watched networking scale from spending 9 hours downloading a book over 110bps (yes, that's one hundred ten bits per second) dialup as an amazing ability, to streaming multiple live HD video from anywhere to wireless devices at 17Mbps (contrast seventeen million bits per second) as a cultural norm.

I do not doubt the ability to solve technical and financial challenges associated with scaling up an ad-hoc network. Been there, done that, can do it again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_network

Yes, I'm sure ad-hoc mesh wifi is an excellent solution to limited across-the-ocean bandwidth.

It is a solution to monthly data caps, enabling solutions like Popcorn Time. As has been noted, if infrastructure exists to facilitate questionable solutions, then use-case pressures arise to persuade better solutions to larger problems. If people have enough bandwidth to serve their video-streaming interests, some solution will appear, persuading both local data infrastructure improvements and, say, Netflix warehousing data in NZ for more efficient use of across-the-ocean bandwidth.

And speaking of across-the-ocean bandwidth: don't underestimate the bps of a freighter stuffed to the gills with MicroSD cards. https://xkcd.com/691/

The bandwidth is impressive. The latency... not so...

Everyone sharing everything they have downloaded in a giant cache via mesh networking? Yip, its a great solution. One person endures a slow download, all those who follow have a grand speedy old time.

You don't necessarily need across-the-ocean bandwidth to facilitate NZ file sharing. Just adapt the "college dorm has a massive fileserver with pirated movies, so that movies only need to be downloaded from the internet at large once" model.

I blow part of my monthly 'real across-the-ocean internet' limit downloading Night of the Living Dead from archive.org, then provide access to it for other New Zealanders using the hypothetical local mesh network.

So now you have a single home computer and a crappy 802.11 router serving the first week of House of Cards to everyone in New Zealand? Or, even worse, you have a BT net on the mesh which completely overloads whatever poor sap(s) happen(s) to be in the bridge in the graph?

And we haven't even gotten to any of the other problems, like address assignment, routing, etc.

With this purely hypothetical mesh network, ideally files would be spread out across the network, bittorrent style. If the mesh has a single node bridging two otherwise large and connected graphs, then the mesh network would be in a poor state to begin with. This is assuming a healthy network.

More realistically, ISPs could place far higher bandwidth limits on local (to NZ) traffic. That is, if it is just the undersea cables that are lacking, not the rest of the infrastructure as well...

I'm not saying either of these are realistic or easy. I'm just saying that the sarcastic quip "I'm sure ad-hoc mesh wifi is an excellent solution to limited across-the-ocean bandwidth." is not a real criticism of the proposal.

A lot of these are solved problems. In one neighborhood in NYC the local mesh wifi was able to provide better internet service than Verizon. http://rhicenter.org/redhookwifi/

Bittorrent could be scoped to the country too, it doesn't have to seed or download across the ocean.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hola-better-intern...

oh well.. you can watch .. uh... rugby or something.

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