By MICHAEL FOREMAN
Internet users have been led to expect that the Southern Cross cable will bring faster and cheaper access, but internet service providers are proving to be shy in predicting its exact benefits.
Telecom New Zealand, which has been partly responsible for raising consumer expectations through a series of television
advertisements, was unable to shed much light on this question at a media briefing last week.
Several Telecom managers were confident that the cable would remove "bottlenecks" and "international blockages," thus reducing "latency" and "ping times."
But despite repeated questioning none was able to say how much extra bandwidth would be allocated to Telecom's service providers Xtra and Jetstream, or whether users should expect faster download times.
According to spokesman Glen Sowry, Telecom will initially be using five gigabits of the total 120-gigabit capacity of Southern Cross, but this will be used to support wholesale ISPs and other voice and data traffic, as well as the carrier's ISPs. This compared with the one-gigabit capacity of the existing PacRim cable, which is supplemented by satellite bandwidth.
Ihug managing director Nick Wood said his company would not buy Southern Cross bandwidth directly but would lease more capacity through Telecom's Global Gateway.
"It's just not cost-effective to buy it directly unless you are buying it in bucketloads."
He predicted that the biggest impact of the cable would be on broadband services like ihug's Ultra and Telecom's Jetstream.
"It won't make a lot of difference to dialups," Mr Wood said.
Nigel Colling, chief operating officer of Gulf Harbour-based bandwidth wholesaler Quest Communications, said the cable would allow his company to offer a better quality of service to its ISP customers but he doubted residential dialup users would notice a difference.
Clear spokeswoman Rochelle Lockley said ClearNet had secured $40 million worth of Southern Cross bandwidth in January, but she was unable to say how much capacity had been acquired or what proportion of ClearNet's existing capacity this represented.
