I fell in love (again) with New Zealand and Australia over the holidays. (I’m sorry too!) But I couldn’t believe people put up with their bits being metered. Even coming from laggard U.S., I felt like I was sucking bandwidth out of a cocktail straw.
Hotels charged $30 a day as an ante — a few YouTube shorts is all it takes to reach the daily limit, after which you pay for every mb. (Exception: Hotel So with free broadband wifi.) Forget about uploading all your photos. Cafes with wifi charged high fees too. Few non-geek friends had broadband at home.
Immediately after I returned to the U.S., things started looking up down under. Australia’s getting faster and cheaper broadband with a new undersea cable, and NZ’s making changes too. Good on ya!
Meanwhile, in the UpSide down, Time Warner’s starting to test pay-per-bit pricing. Other providers are watching closely. And still other providers are watching us closely. With immunity! Feh.
These developments get me really chuffed:
FRUSTRATED by the NSW Government’s stalled free wi-fi project, a group of Facebookers have decided to start their own. It was inspired by futurist Mark Pesce (
Mob Rules!) to create a free wireless network, which the group hopes will one day cover Sydney and make it easy for anyone to enjoy the convenience of free internet access for quick tasks such as checking email.
What if there was free Wifi across the whole city of Sydney, Australia? It is perfectly possible. And YOU can help make it happen. The Technology: the Meraki wireless mesh hardware, cheap, easy to set up and easier to share. Sydney is bootstrapping right now, and you can say “I was part of the free Wifi revolution in Sydney!” We are not related to
Meraki in any way - we are a collection of individuals who are interested in changing the world, one neighborhood at a time.
We want to build a free community wireless network with our neighbours, using our spare bandwidth.
At the end of the day you will be hard pressed to find individuals who can afford sharing their bandwidth in the current New Zealand broadband landscape. In this country there’s no concept of “unlimited” bandwidth. People are still being charged in plans that go from a minimum of 1GB (yes, believe me), going through 5GB, 10GB and so on.
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