Peter Griffin: Not-so-high-speed internet

My faith in New Zealand as a technologically progressive nation was partially restored last week. Vodafone launched its third-generation mobile network, complete with video telephony. CokeTunes opened a major music download service that will donate its profits to local musicians.

The new services come after a long drought of innovation on the local scene since Telecom launched its T3G network late last year.

I was feeling good about it all until I read about what's happening in Britain right now. There, the cable provider NTL has just committed to upgrading all of its high-speed internet customers to blisteringly fast 10Mbps (megabit per second).

For those of you who don't know your bits from your bytes, that's around 40 times faster than the 256Kbps (kilobit per second) connections most of us who have shifted to broadband use.

As we struggle to catch up with our peers in terms of broadband usage, they leap away from us again.

NTL is starting with its current residential customers who are sitting on 3Mbps connections but intends to have all of its 1.5 million broadband customers on 10Mbps connections within 18 months. It's not going to charge existing customers for the upgrade either.

Download caps will stay in place but increase in size from 30 to 75GB per month. Imagine that! The average hard drive is only 80GB in size. NTL customers will be able to download a hard-drive worth of content every month. And at 10Mbps, all the services we've heard so much about - internet TV, video-on-demand, podcasting, online gaming, remote monitoring - become so much easier to deliver.

There's a good reason NTL can do this - many of its customers are on fibre optic links laid down over the last few years at huge cost to NTL. The company is still losing money as a result of this outlay. But there are a lot of people in Britain, so the average cost of providing the service is lower. The company will make money eventually.

In New Zealand no one is willing to build a second national network for phone and internet access, and we are lumbered with relatively slow connections and restrictive download caps.

The Government's digital strategy (www.digitalstrategy.govt.nz), which is being funded to the tune of $400 million, has a number of high-minded goals, one of which is to have most homes connecting to the internet on connections of at least 5Mbps by 2007. The problem with that target is that the rest of the world has much more ambitious goals in the same timeframe. NTL itself claims its networks of fibre and copper will be capable of delivering 30Mbps to 50Mbps speeds when upgrades are undertaken. What sounded far-sighted and ambitious last year is quickly becoming bog standard elsewhere in the world.

The real driver for the take-up of new technology is high-speed internet access and in this crucial area we look set to continue dragging the chain.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY