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Auckland, New Zealand
Smurf sized geeky person with a penchant for IT, gaming, music and books. Half of industrial duo 'the craze jones'. Loves data, learning new things, teaching new things and being enthusiastic.

Sunday 26 February 2012

The state of NZ internet

Following a couple of tweets earlier today stating that our Internet in NZ is somewhat better than we folk who complain think it is, I decided to do a bit of my own research.    I've found in the past that many 'facts' stated in newspapers are outrageously wrong as journalists have a tendency to misread or misrepresent data in order to create a good headline, this means I like to dig around and find out facts for myself as basically I don't trust journalists as far as I can throw them.

So, what was it that got my blood boiling this morning?  Someone stating that 80% of NZ internet users get speeds greater than 10Mbps.  What a load of tosh!   Yes, the capability may exist and the telecoms may tell us that they're providing these speeds, but we're certainly not getting these speeds.  

I decided to dig further and use an Internationally recognized set of stats to find out the truth... you too can find out stats for yourself right here:  http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/.  The actual official real and true factual stats on New Zealand's State of the Internet:
  • 23% of internet users are achieving a connection speed greater than 5Mbps (NOT 80% > 10Mbps)
  • 72.1% of internet users achieving connection speed greater than 2Mbps and less than 5Mbps
  • 0.8% of internet users achieving connection speeds between 256kbps and 2Mbps
  • 4.1% of internet users achieving connection speed less than 256kbps
  • The average connection speed in NZ for Q3 2011 was 3.988 Mbps.   
I dream of 10 Mbps, my ADSL2+ modem yearns for speeds greater than 4 Mbps.... as for upload speed, I may as well just use snail mail.   

I am on the Vodafone Ideal Pack Red.   This means I'm on the Red Network which is Vodafone's unbundled ADSL2+ network and apparently I have max upload and max download speeds.  To quote a Tui ad - yeah right!   If you want to know more about the Red Network, there's a discussion over on Geekzone: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=40&topicid=22646

To further prove my point, if the Akamai data aren't enough proof, here's a speed test performed at 2.30pm on Sunday 26th Feb 2012 on my 'High Speed ADSL2+ 20GB max/max' connection. 


My parents are always amazed at how fast my Internet connection is, they too are on ADSL2+ but are even unluckier in their connection speeds than I am due to being out in the sticks of Whangarei; on top of painfully slow speeds their connection stops working completely between 6pm and 9pm every night.  I'm just thankful that doesn't seem to happen in Auckland; one small mercy at least.

If you're lucky enough to be one of the few people who achieve speeds greater than 10 Mbps (and it's certainly not 80% of the population), then please don't rub it in the faces of those of us paying an arm and a leg for extremely sucky connection speeds.