Interesting article from CloudFlare...

http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/

While NZ isn't mentioned I'm picking we get lumped in with Australia
for which they have this to say...

"Australia

Australia is the most expensive region in which we operate, but for an
interesting reason. We peer with virtually every ISP in the region
except one: Telstra. Telstra, which controls approximately 50% of the
market, and was traditionally the monopoly telecom provider, charges
some of the highest transit pricing in the world ��� 20x the benchmark
($200/Mbps). Given that we are able to peer approximately half of our
traffic, the effective bandwidth benchmark price is $100/Mbps.

To give you some sense of how out-of-whack Australia is, at CloudFlare
we pay about as much every month for bandwidth to serve all of Europe
as we do to for Australia. That���s in spite of the fact that
approximately 33x the number of people live in Europe (750 million)
versus Australia (22 million).

If Australians wonder why Internet and many other services are more
expensive in their country than anywhere else in the world they need
only look to Telstra. What's interesting is that Telstra maintains
their high pricing even if only delivering traffic inside the country.
Given that Australia is one large land mass with relatively
concentrated population centers, it's difficult to justify the pricing
based on anything other than Telstra's market power. In regions like
North America where there is increasing consolidation of networks,
Australia's experience with Telstra provides a cautionary tale."
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