Comfort of your OWN Internet

Ahhh I finally have my own broadband connected in this new country. After weeks of house hunting, then settling in and finally trying to get a landline and ADSL connected - it's all now working!

My only complaint is that the ADSL speeds in this country are very poor. Man, I thought Australia lagged behind the world in ADSL standards - but here in New Zealand, there is no support for ADSL2 or ADSL2+ and the copper phone network is so outdated that rarely are speeds above 4MB achievable to the exchange. Uploads are rarely experienced above 128k so these guys are certainly in the dark ages.

When I enquired about all this, most of the blame seems to centre around 'limited competition' - you see there are only two phone companies here: Telecom and Vodafone. Prior to Vodafone entering the market, options for locals were very limited and even more expensive. Telecom didn't even have a GSM cellular network, rather relying on older CDMA technology and it wasn't until Vodafone built their own cell phone network that things got competitive. (Even still rates are massively higher than other countries)

Hopefully as time goes by more players enter the NZ market and makes things nicer for the locals. (I'll just have to get used to things before heading back home in a years time!)

Oh and the other thing I found interesting, they use a completely different style telephone jack to what we see in the USA and Australia. The local standard is a form of BT (British Telecom) jack that I haven't seen in 10 years, very outdated and frustrating when trying to hook up landline phones and ADSL modems! Most modem phone cabling comes in the RJ11 style (standard US / AUS) plug type. So I had to race around and find convertors.

Having my Cisco wireless box working well is very handy! Unlike back home, there aren't very many wireless networks around the place - I tried a war walk last night with the laptop and didn't pickup anything. It seems my WPA security on the wireless box won't be targeted too much then hey? Unless some of the farm animals are going to go all hacker on me ...

Ok, I had better run - got to head off to a job interview in an hour or so.