New Zealanders compare OECD broadband markets

pepsiman

Hello.

I found this report while researching Norwegian broadband offers and thought it might interest you

From the report's summary:

This report presents findings from a review of broadband price and performance data from 26
OECD countries in order to objectively compare relative broadband services with those available
in New Zealand. The study, commissioned by InternetNZ, is based on 2,586 broadband packages
from 388 internet service providers in 26 OECD countries collected in the last week of April and
the first week of May 2006. The study covers business and residential products and includes
DSL, cable, fibre to the home, satellite and wireless broadband. Key price and performance
indicators are assessed on a country by country basis and comparisons of speed, cost and
restrictions are made.

Media release: Kiwi broadband just doesn't measure up
Report (PDF file): Comparison of OECD Broadband Markets

bealtine

Interesting summary from this report:

Ireland

Ireland is often compared with New Zealand. Ranking 24 in this study, the two countries also rank closely in terms of broadband subscriptions. Ireland ranks 23 for broadband uptake and 15 for e-readiness (New Zealand is 22 and 14 respectively). However, Ireland has significantly lower levels of overall internet uptake than New Zealand and so the transition it is facing is from no-connection to broadband (versus the majority of New Zealanders making the transition from dial-up to broadband). The Irish government has regulated the broadband market and is funding major infrastructure projects for metropolitan fibre and rural networks.
The current environment is perhaps reflected in the plethora of products available, including the highest percentage of wireless products assessed for any country and one third of products offering synchronous connectivity (which pushes the average price up). The Irish are also relatively high users of satellite broadband and therefore the high connection fee and relatively
high subscription cost of this and wireless again raises the overall costs of Irish broadband. In summary, Irish broadband is relatively slow and expensive. The average download speed is around 2.2Mbps and 25% of all products are below 1Mbps. Ireland ranks in the bottom quartile in terms of upload speeds, the most widely available being 256Kbps (21% of all products). Whilst premium products do exist, particularly for business users, costs are in the upper third of all countries.

jfanning

Even though NZ and Ireland are close on the OECD reports the services aren't that comparable. The DSL packages are all slow upload, and then all have very low download limits (usually 500MB - 10GB per month), with having to pay for more data or getting dropped to 64k download limit. My in-laws pay around NZ$95 (about 45 euro) per month for 256/128k dsl+phone.

The big difference seems to be that in NZ a lot of remote areas (sort of) acutally have access to DSL. The government has just stated that they are going to force LLU on Telecom NZ which should improve things, and they are meant to be getting naked DSL