I’m going to miss the magic cloud of Internet that follows me around. (at least, without it costing me per kilobyte..)
_hristine
One of the little perks of my work is getting a better (read: cheaper and more capable) cellphone plan that I’ve had previously. That’s nice and all, and after much deliberation I slapped a small data plan on it. It still costs less than I’ve been spending on my old plan, but I have a shiny new capability.
Sort of.
Kiwis and Aussies will be unsurprised to learn that $10/mo gets me a pitiful 100MB of data; any international reader from the first world will most likely be slack-jawed with amazement. This is a charge rate comparable to Actrix’s rates for international traffic two decades ago; at that point Actrix at least had the excuse that as and that they were one of the first ISPs in the world they were running on what was, at the time, horrifically expensive proprietary Unix hardware and, perhaps more importantly, New Zealand’s international Internet pipe was less than a half megabit for the whole country.
But still. Two decades.
Two things rammed it home for me: LCA2010 where I got to work with a warm, comfortable, CBD-encompassing cloud of 802.11 goodness courtesy of CityLink’s event sponsorship for a week, and Christine’s comment above. In Canada, whose inhabitants consider themselves horribly mobile Internet deprived, she enjoys a 6GB/mo plan. That would cost me $600 per month at the rates I’ve got.
fuck you greedy telco pricks for wanting to double-dip. Will never have sustainable profits while you view business as stripmining value.
gnat
Things aren’t much better on the wired front, either. I loves me my Saturn cable modem, but it’s not exactly cheap—in fact, it’s probably my biggest discretionary spend—and TelstraClear, who inherited their network, have pretty much put it on ice. ADSL is a mess of uneven availability and government-mediated poo-flinging contests over third-party access to the network. The big two told the country’s internet exchanges to go fuck off a few years back, and removed their national/international differential charging. And I know from customers of mine from the contracting days that at least one of said big two are happy to use various forms of leverage to try and prevent their customers from using the IXen around the country to help undermine them further.
Because what they want are a series of closed gardens they can double (or more!) dip. The fact that these sorts of policies mean it’s more sensible, from a cost perspective, for New Zealand Internet businesses, even ones serving New Zealanders, to host offshore means as a nation we’re pissing away money and skills to further line the pockets of a fairly small pool of shareholders of two not terribly well-run companies.
Now hearing from Gordon Cook on Internet as most important piece of infratructure for 21st Century.gnat
It’s a reasonable argument to make, and, to my mind, it underscores how badly off we are. When the Dunedin made it’s run of refrigerated meat from New Zealand we were using cutting edge technology to give ourselves a leg-up in the world; it propelled New Zealand to great wealth for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century; we made cutting-edge cutting-edge use of transport technology domestically. Hydro power, geothermal, you name it.
And then we stopped investing. Our rail is now a joke, more suited to third world nations; I had the humiliating experience of explaining to a French immigrant how long Auckland to Wellington takes by rail when she innocently inquired (after explaining Paris to Marsailles is 4 hours). Now we actively fuck up renewable energy development in order to score what will be expensive political points at the expense of ideological enemies. Our telecommunications sector is little better; in the 90s Telecom was an exercise in massive wealth extraction and underinvestment (remember those ads, set on the beach, claiming their old analogue phones were superior to the nasty GSM phones that “chopped the signal up”?).
The upshot of all this is that we still have pretty terrible internet access, domestically and internationally. It’s something that could be providing us with distance-erasing benefits in high-value industries, but instead we’ll spend hundreds of millions subsiding pollution-driven industries in moves that harken back to an era of SMPs, currency controls, and other attempts to ignore the reality of a changing world.
Pleasantly surprised to note that the Sony-Ericsson PC suite will out-of-the-box sync with any SyncML capable host—Funambol or eGroupware—thereby syncing your phone to the rest of your world. While I’ve got a (tiny) data plan and I̵
Tracked: Mar 21, 21:53