
Kim Dotcom’s plan to give New Zealanders free Internet could just work - Cbasedlifeform
http://thenextweb.com/au/2012/11/18/kim-dotcoms-plan-to-give-new-zealanders-free-internet-could-just-work/?fromcat=all
======
lancewiggs
Pacific Fibre co founder here. Most of the article is right, some is wrong. I
wrote about the underlying issues here:
[http://lancewiggs.com/2012/11/05/pacific-fibre-ii-
background...](http://lancewiggs.com/2012/11/05/pacific-fibre-ii-background-
and-questions-for-new-players/)

Pacific Fibre, the company, is closed down. We had a great contract to build,
solid customer contracts for launch but failed to build an investor book to
the required us$300m. The cable was to be 12-15 Tb/s, and use technology that
was a lot more upgradable than the existing cable. Demand and business model
were never an issue. Someone plonking $1-300m in the table was, even though
they'd likely multiply that amount significantly. Our competitor, for example,
had their cable build cost paid for by launch date, and their build cost was
several times larger.

Kim Dotcom managed to stir up a lot of people, the primary issue for him,
assuming he raised the money, would be landing rights into the USA. But even
as it is increasingly apparent that he's the victim here, he is still wanted
by to be extradited by the same USA authorities who froze his assets.

~~~
zero_intp
Kim has friends at the tier 1 level, that should be clear from the Mega days.
Those same commodity bandwidth friends would likely be willing to expand into
an industry breaking market like NZ. Those players would likely be willing and
capable of terminating a cable AND providing transit.

~~~
veb
I've always wondered why big tech companies haven't used New Zealand as an
experimental place for their "plans".

What I mean by that is, we have 4 million people, and we're not a large place
by any means (2,000km in total length, something like that).

If Google wanted to show the world their "vision", they could simply come to
NZ, buy a mobile carrier (for millions, not billions of dollars) and give
everyone free plans (or whatever their vision is) and lay down fibre to
everyone in the country (much faster than the stupid government imo) . They'd
even be able to get their awesome self-driving cars on the roads fairly
easily, without having to spend so much damn money lobbying.

As per the NZ public, we _love_ new stuff. Right now, we're ripped off in
every aspect (consumer-wise). Some massve corporation would change this
country in a heartbeat, and for the better. (I'd hope anyway).

New Zealand, in my opinion, has an awesome "sample" size (regarding
population). We were one of the first countries in the world to go from cash
to using EFTPOS (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFTPOS>) extremely fast.

>> "EFTPOS is highly popular in New Zealand, and being used for about 60% of
all retail transactions.[23] In 2009, there were 200 EFTPOS transactions per
person"

To me, it makes so much sense for massive corporations to come to NZ, trial
their stuff _easily_, and for half the cost (made up number) than it would be
to do it in the US.

Once people see how awesome NZ is when it comes to all these self-driving
cars, cheap/free internet, cheap phones, and cheap/free phone data/calls/sms
surely the rest of the world would want to be just like us? :]

My two cents. :]

~~~
ARama
I definitely agree with you, I'd love to see more tech companies entering the
NZ market. Sadly we are lagging behind other countries when it comes to
technology.

One of my own goals is to help introduce a better environment for technology
in NZ. Hopefully encouraging more people to start their own startup and base
their operations in NZ ( I'm planning on basing my startup here in NZ ).

------
ricardobeat
From my layman's point of view, this article is delusional and sounds written
by a fan, not a journalist.

 _the first would see Mega funding the project itself once it became popular
through purchasing bandwidth. This is the most viable option [...] Dotcom
wants to commit Mega to purchasing $20 million_

But who will fund the $300m for actually building it?

 _He’d need to find $300 million of private angel funding to get moving,
something which the country has little of, but should be straightforward to
find overseas_

Yeah, shouldn't be that hard, like, he is Kim Dotcom!

 _unlike any other businessman, he’s excellent at cutting through red tape_

Is he? I haven't heard about that.

~~~
brazzy
If you read "red tape" as "laws" and "cutting through" as "breaking", it makes
a lot more sense.

------
Breakthrough
_"Dotcom says that the company will consume 2 terabits of daily bandwidth,
which in perspective is more bandwidth in a day than the entire country uses
right now."_

I'm fairly certain that a country with more than 2.6 million people on the
internet [1] will use more than 256 GiB in a day... Even if just 256,000 of
those people (~10%) downloaded a single megabyte in a day, you're already at
the 2 terabit figure - and something tells me that much more than 10% of the
internet connected population in NZ will download more than a single megabyte
in a day.

Come to think of it, I probably downloaded around a megabyte worth of stuff
just opening the article to begin with.

[1] Ministry of Social Development, New Zealand, "Telephone and internet
access in the home." [http://socialreport.msd.govt.nz/social-
connectedness/telepho...](http://socialreport.msd.govt.nz/social-
connectedness/telephone-internet-access.html)

~~~
thechut
Keep in mind that all internet in NZ and Australia is metered. Similar to
mobile data here, except more like pay-as-you-go. You pay for a block of
bandwidth and then use it till it's gone. Not the same idea as here in the
States.

~~~
akiselev
But with this Pacific Fibre cable the populace would probably see much cheaper
bandwidth, especially if the NZ government is trying to get 50%+ of the
population 100mbps.

~~~
lostlogin
I have spoken with people high up in the Ultra fast broadband rollout, and
they have no idea. I work for a radiology company, and we would like to be
able to have 1 gig files belonging to 20ish patients shuffled across town in a
reasonable time frame. The UFB guy just didn't get it - orthopedic surgeons
see patients for 15mins tops, and spending that waiting for imaging to arrive
is somewhat useless. The guy was telling me how well YouTube works on his home
UFB. Great.

Edit: To be clear, the people I talked to had no idea, presumably the company
as a whole does as the scale of the work they are doing is pretty huge, and
there haven't been big issues as far as I am aware.

------
corin_
> _Dotcom wants to commit Mega to purchasing $20 million of bandwidth from the
> new cable company that he would resurrect, since Mega is now registered in
> New Zealand. According to the NBR, that would give Dotcom around half of
> what he needs if he paid for ten years. Even if that were to work, Mega
> would have to prove extremely popular, with Megaupload previously purchasing
> $40 million of bandwidth. Dotcom says that the company will consume 2
> terabits of daily bandwidth, which in perspective is more bandwidth in a day
> than the entire country uses right now._

I clicked the "According to the NBR" link ([http://www.nbr.co.nz/opinion/kim-
dotcoms-pacific-fibre-fanta...](http://www.nbr.co.nz/opinion/kim-dotcoms-
pacific-fibre-fantasy-vs-rod-drurys-ppp-reality)) and found nothing there, so
can't work out if I'm missing something or if they're talking rubbish.

As they were talking about the total cost being $400m, and 10 years covering
half, they are saying that Mega would pay $20m/year? And use 2TB/day? Meaning
$27400/terabit (~$22000 USD)?

~~~
AdrienPothier
I think it means 2 Tbps, which makes a lot more sense.

------
herge
Good on him. I had a New Zealander friend explain to me that residential
bandwidth gets metered into two categories: local to New Zealand (cheap or
even free) and any data that comes from overseas, which I find a complete
ripoff.

~~~
marquis
I don't believe this is true, at least for the larger ISPs (may be the case of
Universities). A friend of mine owns a small ISP in New Zealand and I've
discussed this with them as I assumed there would be a huge demand for local
data centres and storage/streaming services. Right now all traffic goes out of
the country and back in again - that's what should feel like a rip-off.

Apparently Telecom could do this but it would require a court order or major
political pressure. If this were happening now you'd see a lot more innovation
in the digital space, and the experience of using the internet in NZ, in terms
of streaming media etc. Netflix for example declined to startup business in NZ
because of these problems. [http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-
living/6045189/NZ-...](http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-
living/6045189/NZ-internet-a-deterrent-to-online-TV)

~~~
lostlogin
I live in NZ and that was true once with some ISPs. I don't know of any
companies that do it now. Some stuff is unmetered - usually stuff like on
demand video which they get you to pay extra for as a package.

~~~
brendonjohn
Snap apparently don't charge for local traffic. I know a couple guys that work
there

~~~
lostlogin
Actually, my own plan doesn't charge for VoIP data (as far as I can tell),
just a fixed fee. Not that VoIP would use much.

------
shabble
There was an interesting article on "Australia's Strategy"[1] published by
Stratfor I came across a couple of months ago that argued that Australia has
such a huge dependence on access to sea lanes and shipping that it has made a
great effort to stay friendly with the dominant naval superpowers. It would
seem to me that an awful lot of their conclusions apply similarly to New
Zealand[2], and the risks of pissing off the US will restrict the extent to
which they could become a data-haven in the way some commentors here are
describing.

An operation the size of this new Mega will almost certainly rile up the US
over IP issues, whether there's some element of plausible deniability over its
intended use or not.

[1] <http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/australias-strategy>

[2] Although I welcome anyone more informed to point out significant
differences; I'm by no means an expert in/on any of this.

------
olalonde
If anything, Kim is certainly brilliant at PR. With such a grandiose promise,
he will gain wider support for his cause within the general population which
will in turn cause more politicians to side with him. It doesn't really matter
if he can pull it off or not. If he doesn't pull it off, he can always blame
the FBI/MPAA for not giving him enough money (he likely won't get any at all).
People will now hate the FBI/MPAA even more as they are "preventing" them from
having free Internet, getting him even more popular support despite failing to
deliver on his promise. Brilliant!

~~~
brendonjohn
Kim dotcom hasn't proposed investing. He has shown interest in being the
biggest customer. The risk of investing in the cable is huge, there isn't a
datacenter in NZ that can utilize the proposed bandwidth increase. This is
essentially a chicken-or-the-egg situation where someone other than dotcom
will be bearing the risk.

An article where the reporter actually spoke with DotCom:
[http://www.nbr.co.nz/opinion/dotcoms-cable-fact-or-
fantasy-k...](http://www.nbr.co.nz/opinion/dotcoms-cable-fact-or-fantasy-kim-
makes-his-case)

~~~
olalonde
Ah ok, got it. This sentence was a bit misleading though:

> Dotcom took to Twitter recently with a new-found passion, promising that he
> would relaunch the “Pacific Fibre” project for the country and deliver “free
> broadband for all [New Zealanders].” How exactly does he plan to do that? By
> suing the pants off the American movie industry.

------
tgb
What is up with the next web and other website like Wired that keep getting
linked here? They overload the purpose of the arrow keys which screws me over
big time if I misspress slightly while trying to scroll down. The article I
got moved to then switched to using the arrow keys to change between pages of
the article, not between articles, and so I could no longer go back to the
previous article. Even the back button on my browser was broken by their
website and would just end up taking me back to the place that I was at. It
makes reading so damn annoying; why do they do it? Wired even had it that if I
accidently hit, say, right arrow and then tried to go back with the left arrow
key it would 'forget' the fact that I had all the pages of the article open so
I would no longer be able to see where I used to be.

Please don't make arrow keys do things! They're right next to up/down arrow
keys which I use to read your article and it's easy to not actually hit 'alt'
when trying to go back or forward in history.

~~~
mattflaschen
I agree this is quite annoying. I just told them so. Consider doing the same
so they know it's widespread. <http://www.wired.com/about/feedback/>

------
denzil_correa
I made the exact same submission 2 hours ago -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4800435>

I wonder if there's a need for smarter duplicate URL elimination.

~~~
kristofferR
Why? That would just result in this story, which I found interesting and a lot
of other people seemingly also do, not getting picked up and placed on the
front page.

The issue isn't duplicate URLs, the issue is that the submission system is
broken. This is an example of that. When a story doesn't get a single upvote
the first time it is submitted, but gets 50+ upvotes when it is submitted just
two hours later, something is wrong with the system.

In good upvoting systems the "winners" should be decided by how interesting
they are and not by the hour they was submitted or seemingly totally random
factors. Creating a system like that is incredibly hard though.

~~~
cryptoz
> something is wrong with the system.

Maybe. But really, people were just asleep and didn't feel like waking up to
give their upvotes out. Most people who read HN were asleep three hours ago.
It's Sunday morning, many HN readers are on the west coast of the US. For
them, the previous submission was at 4am. Why are you surprised it didn't get
many upvotes? Even for US East readers, it was 7am on Sunday.

Timing your submission for when most people are asleep and expecting upvotes
is not going to work. If you want people to read it, submit when they're
awake.

~~~
k-mcgrady
The system should account for this. This is the internet, people are always
awake and using the site somewhere in the world. Maybe measuring page views
and adapting the algorithm to give more weight to a vote at times when there
are few people on the site would help.

------
javajosh
I'd like to hear from investors that Dotcom pitched, as to why they didn't
invest.

------
plg
Wow I'm impressed, the numa numa guy has come a long way

