Bill Bennett - New Zealand telecoms and technology news
Home of the Download Weekly, the New Zealand telecommunications newsletter – also covers personal productivity tools and local technology issues.
Rural users switch as low cost Starlink plan take off - Bill Bennett
Starlink makes waves in rural New Zealand. Three weeks after it launched, (Download Weekly March 15) Starlink’s low-cost satellite broadband plan is making waves with frustrated rural telecoms users.Starlink describes its $79 plan as a ‘deprioritised service’. It means that, should the network be congested, customers on the plan will …
Extending New Zealand fibre beyond UFB2 - Bill Bennett
The second phase, UFB2, scheduled to complete at the end of 2022 extends that footprint to reach 85 per cent of the country. This leaves 15 per cent of New Zealand having to rely on either fixed wireless broadband, copper networks, or, in more remote cases, satellite broadband. All these technologies have improved in recent years, but they can ...
Measuring Broadband NZ report highlights rural-urban divide
MBNZ report highlights rural-urban divide, Tuanz presses for rural upgrade, Mateparae moves to Spark leadership squad. Autumn 2023's Measuring Broadband New Zealand report shows a continuing gulf between fixed wireless broadband performance in areas where fibre is available and in rural areas where there is less direct competition.
Starlink fills gaps but doesn’t fix NZ rural coverage - Bill Bennett
Starlink’s business class dish costs a whopping NZ$4,374.80 up front. Plans start at NZ$426 a month for a terabyte of data, a six terabyte plan costs NZ$2507 a month. This is more than 20 times what a user would pay for a fibre connection with the same performance.
NZ broadband faces competitive reset - Bill Bennett
Low Earth orbit satellites, 5G and a fibre speed bump are set to reboot New Zealand broadband competition.. It’s a decade since the first customers connected to Ultrafast broadband. At that time fibre looked the likely Kiwi broadband future.
Benoit Felten on the UFB fibre upgrade - Bill Bennett
In late 2021 New Zealand's fibre wholesale companies boosted standard speeds on their networks from 100 mbps to 300 mbps. Paris-based analyst Benoit Felton puts the move into perspective: As an international analyst of all things broadband, I use few examples more frequently than New Zealand when discussing decisive and effective policy.
What is this site about and who is Bill Bennett?
Bill Bennett is a freelance New Zealand technology and business journalist. He started writing about technology in 1980 as staff writer on Practical Computing magazine. He left the UK in 1987 to work in Wellington on The Dominion as Computer Page editor. He spent a decade working in Sydney, Australia. There he was managing editor of two ...
Understanding the cost of New Zealand broadband - Bill Bennett
Jun 17, 2024 · The press release says the average cost of a broadband connection in New Zealand is US$48.60 (for the rest of this story all prices are in US dollars). This compares with $2.40 for an average plan in Sudan. The most expensive is the Solomon Islands where a plan will set you back $457.84. New Zealand is fractionally cheaper than Australia where ...
Extending New Zealand's fibre network - Bill Bennett
Nov 28, 2019 · The UFB1 fibre network reaches three quarters of New Zealand. UFB2 will stretch that to around 87 per cent. We can take fibre further, but that needs taxpayer money. A lot of it. When New Zealand built its copper telephone network, government saw it as a nation-building exercise. Copper phone wires reached almost everywhere.