On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 01:14:02PM +1300, Juha Saarinen wrote: See above. Still, you'll have to agree that such pricing makes it pointless for anyone to buy Jetstream. Not at all. Before I left New Zealand I had Jetscream. Aside from a couple of annoying outages it worked pretty well and the cost seemed reasonable compared to the alternatives in my price bracket. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with this geek gig for the time being, and need a quickish connection. Jetstream is all I can get, even though I'm right across the harbour, only a few km from Auckland (and Takapuna) CBD. In some respects that is a choice you have to make, just like the bigger picture I claimed with regards to New Zealand being a nice place to live --- if you were to move the the CBD your options would perhaps be greater and the price you pay even lower. I've not checked if this is indeed the case, but I'm sure various people in this list can comment on this assertion. If I look at when I would ideally like to live, I know I will be restricting significantly what services and grades of services available to me for a given price. Sounds like you've got a rotten deal there. Anyway, that's not ADSL, it's a dedicated circuit. In Auckland CBD, I understand you can get 2-10Mbps links for NZ$1,000 to $1,200 a month (DDS and UN fibre), all-you-can-eat. That's $3200NZD/month --- assume you use a good percentage of that capacity, say 80% of it. The carrier can then sell (say) 27 of those per STM1. That's $3M NZD/year for everything. Joe, perhaps, you can give a reasonable estimate of what an STM-1 of transit costs right now? If you're on Jetstream 600, and use up 500MB a day, it'd cost over NZ$3,000 a month. On the 1500MB plan, you'd be looking at NZ$2,500. Talk to another carrier. Even in Devonport there are alternatives. Futhermore, you need to factor in purchase parity indices. 5.3 US cents doesn't hurt an American in the wallet quite as much as it does a Kiwi. Indeed... I've come to realize things like the cost of food stuffs (eg. cheese, tomatoes, meat) and indeed most small low-priced commodities seems to be priced as much on psychology as anything. I pay about the same in USD for groceries as I did in NZD when living in NZ. The cost of many of these items is about the same in USD and in NZD, as is the cost of many of the factors that determine this cost. However, for certain more expensive / high-value items, where is becomes worth someone's while to ship them from one place to another, convert monies and all the other things involves in import/export --- there is a cost difference. It seems look at computer (Home PC) prices you get about the same for $1000 USD and you do $2500 NZD or there abouts. I should think bandwidth clearly fits into this latter category when the costs are high enough and the volumes sufficient that it would be very attractive for new players and existing competitors to lower prices to their US equivalent of supply plus a small margin. --cw - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog