Kiwi Internet

An unexpected aspect of traveling around New Zealand was how expensive it was to get Internet access. NZ Telecom will sell you (directly or through vendors such as hotels or Starbucks) prepaid access cards for $10 NZ/hour. Most sizeable towns have one or more Internet cafes where you can get rates as low as $6/hour in touristy places like Rotorua or down to $2/hour in Auckland. Actually, the best deal I found was at a library, which didn't mind at all if I connected my laptop to their Ethernet, but charged me when I used one of their computers, because that was using "their Internet". One Internet cafe offered wireless connectivity, until asked what they charged, when they said they didn't actually have it.

Home access is apparently mostly DSL or dialup. New Zealand is not very high on the OECD broadband uptake figures.

According to OECD figures from June 2005, NZ ranks #22 in broadband uptake, with actually more DSL uptake per capita than the U.S. (#12), but about half total uptake per capita, because U.S. and Canada are big on cable broadband, and NZ has little of that. (U.S., in turn, has about half the total uptake per capita of #1 Korea or #2 Netherlands.)

There was a national ISP meeting in Auckland in November, which led to news about proposals to decouple DSL from voice POTS so that third party carriers could sell DSL and services for it. Telecom of course said that would lead to their ruin, nevermind that such an arrangement seems to work just fine in Japan.

The way things are going stateside, with the minibells now reformed into three big regional telecoms, and Congressional legislation and FCC rulings, the road ahead for the U.S. looks to lead more towards the NZ way than the Japanese or Korean ways.

I remember when national PTTs controled telecom in Europe. That led to things like Minitel, the national French network, which held France back from Internet uptake. Even farther back than the rest of Europe, which was until 1991 doing individual national pieces of implementation for an OSI network, while the U.S. was forging ahead with TCP/IP and the Internet. Only when it became obvious that the academics and rogue companies that had already adopted the Internet in Europe were actually using it did the rest of Europe eventually give up on OSI and switch to the Internet.

As for network protocols or services, telecoms were responsible for X.25, X.400, and ISDN. The first two of these are pretty much dead, and the third only became popular briefly because of the Internet; neither national PTTs nor U.S. RBOCs could figure out how to sell it.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of a single popular Internet service, not electronic mail, mailing lists, anonymous FTP, USENET, WAIS, gopher, WWW, IRC, P2P filesharing, IM, blogs, Craig's list, book retailing (Amazon), everything else retailing (eBay), VoIP, Bittorrent, or iTunes, that was invented or popularized by a telephone company. What would that indicate for a future Internet controled by telephone companies?

-jsq

Comments

[Fazal Majid]

Well, Minitel was actually meant as an act of Colbertian industrial policy, i.e. subsidies to electronics manufacturers. In the early 80s, France had finally gotten over the bulk of migration to digital switching, after decades of neglect (telecoms was the largest item on the national budget for most of the 70s). The makers of electronic switchgear needed some other business selling transistors, and the ministry of PTT decided an electronic phonebook might do the trick. Online services were an afterthought.

As for telcos and innovation, despite being a France Telecom alumnus (fighting the internal battles for the Internet vs. extending the Minitel), I tend to think what used to be said of IBM: "They think when they piss on something, it improves the flavor".