Land of the Long White Fibre-optic Cable

Auckland is famous for a sprawling transportation network that every government seems determined to add to in order to solve the car-clog crisis. If John Key has his way, the entire nation will sport a jolly nice shiny new fibre-optic-cable-to-your-door communications network. And then we'll all have internet so fast our desktops will burst into flames. Cue fireextinguisher.exe

But will this really improve things? Who will use all that data? Does New Zealand need to be the Land of Milk, Honey and Bit-torrents?

I am a high-data user. I can personally chomp through 30GB of data in a fortnight. 60 in a month if I'm particularly bad. I've seen the American advertisements. for 100GB per month. Relatively cheap too. Personally I am in favour of high data caps. But in our society it would be like having a Ferrari with only 1 km of straight road nearby. Nice to have and shiny too, but you simply never use it. Those in favour of high speed, high data internet say it will benefit all New Zealanders and open up technological avenues that we otherwise never conceived of. Rubbish, says I. Unless you are particularly data-heavy, playing a lot of MMO's, downloading movies and endless YouTube clips and everything else at www.etc.com, having internet so fast that it makes the download box explode won't be of much benefit to you.

Prioritised download plans is an idea that our wonderful lecturer posited. You would pay for certain kinds of data to be prioritised and thus they would download quickly. So, for example, you could pay for a Movies Package and those files such as avi, mpg, mp4 etc, would all download at top speed whereas surfing TradeMe would be comparatively pedestrian. High-speed internet would allow for more dynamic pricing schemes and (God willing) cheaper internet access.

There is a point where the speed and amount of data available would become irrelevant. It would be effectively limitless data at nigh-instantaneous speeds. I think what we want is more fast data. And I think what we need is high media download speeds.

I want my movie downloaded in under 20 minutes. But I don't give a toss about how fast Facebook loads.