I have always thought that the best position to be in when you begin to argue a case is to have at least a passing acquaintance with the facts of the matter. This way, even if you are making a series of outrageous and completely unsubstantiated assertions, you at least have a pretty good idea of how far you are overextending yourself and are only then opening yourself up to accusations of, say, arrogance as opposed to stupidity…
So, in the interests of establishing some sort of empirical basis for my claims of outrageously poor service from the telcos, I tried this modem speed test. I make no assertions about its accuracy (I simply googled ‘modem speed test’ and clicked the link), but the results are both terrifying and strangely satisfying.
13120 bps! That is 13.12kbps. And for those of you that haven’t been around that long, that was the standard speed for accessing the internet in, oh, 1983…
Seriously, 13kbps is less than a quarter of the speed of ’standard’ dial-up, 56kbps and just under 20 times slower than what passes for broadband in most parts of New Zealand (256kbps). That is truly terrifying: it’s like being trapped in some alternate reality where people still huddle around the wireless on a sunday night and the telephone is a shared community resource.
The satisfying bit is that the speed test vindicates my rising sense of paranoia. I thought that the connection was slow, little did I dream that it isn’t just slow, it is positively glacial. Last night, I ironed a shirt, from start to finish, waiting for my Twitter page to load. Good god.
Oh, there is one upside: when I am connected (I use that term extremely loosely) to the Internet, I can turn on my speakers and hear radio (AM, I think) through the modem…
Connect Horokiwi!
…if it’s happening here, there’s many other parts of NZ faced with the same problem or worse. Jason Ryan is a resident of Horokiwi, and he’s started the Connect Horokiwi blog to build some community momentum and do something about it…
Hi Jason, I’m only about 1km away from you, just over the hill in Johnsonville, looking at Googlemaps. According to speedtest.net, I’m enjoying broadband 9820 kb/s down and 2018 kb/s up for $70 per month. On a proportional basis, I hope you’re only paying $0.10c per month for your nanomicroband.
Thanks Mike. No, TC have a very reasonable $16.95 plan for unlimited hours — and believe me, I need that sort of time…
I’m in Churton park and I’m already feeding one poor cable-less friend with internet via wifi. We’re getting 5 - 6 Mbps over this link:
http://hoult.org/bruce/merakinet.jpg
Are you in this pic? Quite a bit of Horokiwi Rd is:
http://hoult.org/bruce/newlands-view/grenada_from_bruce.jpg
Thanks for the kind offer Bruce. There are a few residences that can get either wireless or satellite (our place falls into the latter category), but I am pushing for fibre up the road so that the whole community gets the sort of connectivity that is a basic requirement of a knowledge economy.
Once we do get the fibre, I will definitely install a meraki router: love that concept…
If this wasn’t happening in my effective backyard to someone I know, I would laugh.
I have had dealings this week with a company called Nespeed who appear to have franchise for point to point wireless - which would be a a cheaper solution for community access than laying fibre.
Let me know if I can help in anyway though Jason…