On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 07:45:37PM -0500, Joe Abley wrote: Not really -- price yourself half an E1 in New Zealand with IP transit over it, and see how that compares. This is a T1 (uncapped, and performs very well). I think the cost compares quite reasonably to NZ. I guess taking it to the extreme and using a good amount of the bandwidth all the time it would be vastly cheaper than in New Zealand, but I suspect if too many people do this, it will affect pricing models over here too. I have (finally! gods be praised!) a cable modem here for which I pay CAD 45/month (a shade under NZD 70) for unlimited traffic. I've clocked it at 4Mbit/s towards me, and 256kbit/s up. This in a country with a lower population density than New Zealand (although clearly much, much closer to the US). I could compare that to a cable modem here at $30USD/month ignoring deals like first six months for $10 or so. Or similar DSL deals. But they are no the same --- the T1 I have gives 1.5M downstream AND 1.5M upstream, it comes with a reasonable IP address space allocation and more can be routed if so desired. If it breaks at 2am on a Sunday morning, someone will be there to fix it promptly. I don't think that this means anything. Things cost differently in different countries. Indeed. So regardless of the cost of things, there is definitely more choice in little old London, Ontario, than there is in the much larger centre of Auckland, NZ. That's what I think I would be upset about, if I was still living in Auckland. There are some benefits to having a choice. Choice always helps[1] --- but claiming lack of choice and TCNZ is a big scary monopoly-monster doesn't alter the fact the getting bandwidth to New Zealand does and probably always will cost significantly more than say North California or Ontario. --cw [1] FWIW, my T1 provider is a monopoly. There is no way for me to get a T1 without them getting paid for a good chunk of the circuit. - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog