All
One of the best broadband “speed testers” is speedtest.net.
Its slick interface provides estimates of your download and upload
speeds at a click of a button. Interestingly enough, speedtest.net
provides global statistics on the average speed of users from different
countries. Their top 10 countries, by download speed, are:
Japan leads at 9.3Mbps, followed by Sweden on 6.6Mbps. Little surprise
that neither Australia , nor New Zealand show in the top 10.
The speedtest.net statistics for the “Australian continent” shows:
continued
March 18th, 2007 | 9 comments
Sections: Wired, New Zealand
Tags: ADSL, adsl2+, Broadband, speedtest.net, Telecom NZ
TV1 Sunday: Bravo!
TV1’s
Sunday’s “Traffic Jam” segment this evening was spot on. For the first
time New Zealand television has actually produced insightful and
accurate coverage in regard to the state of broadband in New Zealand.
Well done TV1!
In the past, TV coverage in regard to New Zealand broadband has often
been superficial and has often showed a total lack of understanding of
the real issues. An example being Campbell Live
that in January put the blame of poor broadband performance on the
copper local loop. As we all know, the local loop is not the issue. It
is Telecom NZ’s lack of investment in its backhaul network that is to
blame. And for the first time, this came through clearly in TV1’s Sunday
coverage.
My only complaint is the inclusion of Rod Drury’s insane proposal
for a government owned domestic and international fibre network. It
shows a total lack of understanding of the real issues, and would do
little to improve on the current situation. The issue is not
about having sufficient amount of bandwidth between the cities, or even
to the rest of the world. There is plenty of both. The issue is about
competitive access to the end user. Until we have local loop unbundling
fully implemented, only Telecom NZ has competitive access to New Zealand
homes. Adding oodles of government owned fibre up and down the country
will not change that. It will only waste tax payers money.
March 18th, 2007 | 12 comments
Sections: Wired, New Zealand
Tags: ADSL, adsl2+, Sunday, Telecom NZ
Yahoo!XTRA launches tomorrow, nothing new for customers
Telecom NZ’s XTRA and content and service partner Yahoo! is launching their new portal tomorrow under the somewhat awkward name Yahoo!XTRA.
According to the teaser site, “good things happen when Xtra meets Yahoo!” and customers will get the best of Yahoo! in the form of:
As is true with the current XtraMSN portal, the new Yahoo!XTRA portal will also provide local content in the form of:
In other words, nothing new for customers. All of the Yahoo! services, bar Music,
can be used by New Zealanders today, and local news, sport and
entertainment is of course already offered by XtraMSN (and many other
content providers).
It is obvious that the partnership is not about new direct revenue
streams from Xtra customers. At least not initially, as almost all of
Yahoo!’s services are free and already available in NZ. This is all about online advertising.
Yahoo! gets direct access to kiwi eyeballs, and eyeballs equals
revenue. Xtra in return, will undoubtedly get a share of this
advertising revenue stream.
continued
February 28th, 2007 | 8 comments
Sections: Services, New Zealand
Tags: Apple, iPod, iTunes, Telecom NZ, XTRA, Yahoo!
The New Zealand dialup eclipse is near
It looks like dialup is finally about to be eclipsed by broadband as the
access method of choice for New Zealanders. According to research data
provided by Roy Morgan Research
the trend in overall new connections (dialup+broadband) has almost
completely flattened, indicating that the market is reaching saturation.
The kiwis that want to use the internet, are now pretty much all
connected! We are now seeing dialup slowly being superseded by
broadband. Dialup has been trending down sharply since around mid 2004,
as customers slowly, but surely, upgrade to broadband.
A simple extrapolation of the Roy Morgan research data shows that dialup may be eclipsed by broadband as early as next month:
The chart shows thousands of New Zealanders with dialup (blue) and broadband (red) connections at home. The thicker faded lines show the extrapolated trend of broadband soon eclipsing dialup.
continued
February 27th, 2007 | 1 comment
Sections: Wired, New Zealand
Tags: Broadband, Dialup
The disappearing ISPs
According to a release
from the Australian Bureau of Statistics last week, the number of
Australian ISPs dropped by 32% between March 2005 and September 2006
from 689 to 467.
While the number of Australian ISPs have remained relatively static
between 2000 and 2005, the market appears to have been consolidating
significantly in the last 18 months:
[Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics]
While the Australian number of ISPs have remained steady until early
2005, the New Zealand market has seen a gradual decline in ISP numbers
since 1999:
continued
February 23rd, 2007 | 2 comments
Sections: New Zealand, Australia
Tags: Broadband, LLU
More on the New Zealand Dialup vs. Broadband Landgrabs
Last week we contrasted the dialup landgrab against the broadband one in The New Zealand Dialup vs. Broadband Landgrabs.
The article focused on the subscriber numbers of the New Zealand tier-1
providers during the two eras. The dialup landgrab showed that a level
competitive playing field can produce a competitive market. Unfortunately, this has not yet eventuated in the broadband landgrab.
This time around, let’s have a look at it from a slightly different perspective: market share.
We will compare the dialup market shares of the New Zealand providers
at the peak of the dialup landgrab (2004) with the equivalent broadband
market shares today. Of course, the broadband landgrab has not yet
“completed”. (In our estimate we are around halfway there.)
Before we start the discussion, we will divide the providers into two
tiers, based on market share (as measured in dialup or broadband
subscriber numbers):
- Tier 1: providers with more than 5% market share;
- Tier 2: providers with less than 5% market share.
Let’s start with the Tier-1 providers: The dialup landgrab culminated in 2004, and the tier-1 market was then divided as follows:
[Source: Paul Budde analyst reports.]
continued
February 22nd, 2007 | 4 comments
Sections: Wired, New Zealand
Tags: ADSL, Broadband, CallPlus, ICONZ, IHUG, MaxNet, New Zealand, ORCON, Slingshot, Telecom NZ, TelstraClear, Woosh, XTRA
Badly Managed Traffic Management
It
has been all over the media (and the small Kiwi blogsphere) that
Telecom NZ has withdrawn its GO LARGE “unlimited usage” ADSL plan due to
the fact that their “traffic management” went horribly wrong. For good
commentary, see David Farrar, NZ Herald, and TUANZ.
According to Telecom’s own release, it appears they have not only traffic managed a small subset of traffic, such as P2P, but accidentally all of the traffic for GO LARGE customers since the 8th of December last year. Duh!
Unfortunately, it is all but impossible to actually work out what has
been going on in GO LARGE land… They key point being that there is no
explanation given by Telecom to as what “traffic management” actually
means. There are obviously a number of ways that “traffic management”
can be applied to broadband customers. The obvious ones being:
- Per application: provide a certain (smallish) bandwidth
allocation for certain applications (=ports/services), like P2P
applications. For example: limit P2P and other applications to a total
of 200Mbps for all subscribers.
- Per subscriber: provide a certain bandwidth allocation per
subscriber. For example, limit each subscriber to 2Mbps. (This is the
way that all NZ ADSL plans used to work. The new unconstrained plans
changed all that.)
- Per group of subscribers: provide a certain bandwidth
allocation per group of subscribers. For example, limit the total
bandwidth usage for all GO LARGE customers to 200Mbps.
continued
February 22nd, 2007 | 9 comments
Sections: Wired, New Zealand
Tags: ADSL, GO LARGE, Telecom NZ, XTRA
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