On Saturday, Nov 30, 2002, at 16:10 Canada/Eastern, Zuricka Azavedo wrote:
I am studying for my masters at AIS St. Helens. My research focuses on E-Commerce proliferation in the Wine Industry. Most companies that I have spoken with are outside Auckland and seem to suggest that the Internet connection speeds available to them are too slow to even effectively browse the Internet let alone host E-Commerce websites.
If HRH Crown Prince Tupouto can turn up 4Mbit/s internet access to Tonga, I suspect vineyards outside Auckland can obtain sufficient connectivity to browse the web. If any of your research subjects seriously think that the only way they can engage in internet sales or marketing of their products is to host a website on a machine located in rural New Zealand, then that sounds like poor marketing on the part of the twenty-eight gazillion hosting companies on the planet.
Is it true that there are absolutely no connectivity issues anywhere in New Zealand, or is it Vice Versa ?
You can find connectivity problems anywhere on the planet. They are not a New Zealand innovation.
Is it that higher speed telco circuits outside Auckland and Wellington are available but not affordable to most Small Businesses
I suspect that depends on what most small businesses can afford, and what you consider to be "higher speed telco circuits". However, I think you're confusing the availability of cheap, ubiquitous high-speed internet access with the ability to run an on-line service. The two do not go hand-in-hand. It's quite feasible to run large-scale, on-line services with minimal access to the devices that provide them. I suspect most people here have pulled the car over at the side of the road and fixed a broken mail server using a laptop and a 9600bps connection over a cellphone at least once. If you can manage a high-volume internet mail server over a cellphone (and I'm telling you that you can), then it's not much of a stretch to assume you can manage a web server or fifty over a modem.
Also my research guide suggests that perhaps the vision of NZ being totally online and E-Commerce driven is being fuelled only by technical people who are less than 5% on the population. Is this true > ?
If "totally online and E-Commerce driven" means anything, it surely refers to people abandoning their physical forms and existing solely as brains suspended in vats of nutrients. In that case either (a) we're not there yet, or (b) we're there, but ssshh, don't tell anybody. Joe - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog