Juha Saarinen wrote:

On Fri, 23 Nov 2001, Chris Wedgwood wrote:

...

Ironically NZ is probably cheaper than the US for bandwidth now (for home users and small businesses certainly). And by and large the quality of service is no worse.

:::BOGGLE::: What? How? Eh? When did this happen? Hang on... oh... you mean to a select few,

Not even... last time I priced provider bandwidth, it was on par with Japan, which is the most has the most expensive bandwidth of those countries who's telcos aren't "state owned/run". Things may have changed significantly with the landing of the southern cross cable, but I doubt it. I have been seeing some *really* odd routing using the visual traceroute utility going through NZ... I pray to god that some of the apparent pathing is due to stale DNS LOC records and/or a dated APNIC allocation db (I suppose it *might* be due to economics), cause what I've been seeing is completely whacky.

and not to the great unwashed Internet users, who are still paying through every possible orifice for a basic broadband service sans SLAs.

Even Japan has tossed per-miniute billing for internet use and *nobody* of any significance does usage based billing (well, maybe parts of Europe and Ireland). The most recent curious thing to pop up (in Japan) is flat-rate 64kbps wireless access (and the kicker is that compaq flash is the primary form factor for access devices). I cringe whenever I see somebody downunder writing about international IP traffic settlement fees. - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog