Broadband services in NZ

Reading an article today in the Wanganui Chronicle, I am inclined to think that the biggest obstacle to development in NZ is the poor quality and high price of its interest services. Wanganui is one of the largest cities in NZ, yet it has one of the worst internet services in the country. My guess is that the problem will be fixed within 3 years, but thats not soon enough. It will eventually get high speed fibre optic services. The National Party has yet to commit to a fibre optic network connection. Other surrounding districts have it. Wanganui is currently using the old Telecom NZ copper ADSL network. In fact APN has already been contracted to build another 2MB copper line to handle the traffic. It seems silly to be investing in old telephony technology given that fibre is imminent. Fibre services can be as fast as 100-1000Gb depending on the infrastructure constraints. Digital Nation has set up a small privately owned network in Palmerstown. One wonders why the same cannot be done in Wanganui, perhaps with a subsidy from the council. More on that in my next article. The national government proposes to spend $1.6bil on linking the 22 largest cities with fibre optic lines in future.