Would love to see an update on this article as to how things (if at all) have changed.

it is only a KICKSTART. it may never succeed, but it will measure the temperature of how unhappy are people generally with telcos. and that may force telcos to drop price and offer better service.

we all know, a large portion of what we are paying for does not go to infrastructure, in todays telco operation.

Spike here from HQWiFi

Thanks for pointing out our WiFi prices in Milford Sound. Milford sound is serviced by a Satellite connection ($89 for 3GB 3Mbps down, 512kbps up at cost) is about 5 hours travel from our base in Queeenstown and very very hard to service, requiring a full 10 – 16 hour day to replace anything if it breaks. I personally think having internet in Milford (all be it costing such) is a pretty awesome thing.

We have 120 sites and are slowly converting them to UFB (NZ Ultra Fast Broadband) and free where the owners of accommodation and properties are willing to pay for providing the service to their guests. Where they are not willing to pay for the expertise, service and management of the service we recover the cost of installation and operation via user pays (yes, you traveler) and share the revenue generated (that’s right, Internets costs monies and we’re a business which need monies to survive and staff who have cats who like to eat more than birds and mice)

So despite all this our other access rates in locations which are not remote and stunningly beautiful (hope you got off the internet long enough to kayak around the sound or gaze in wonder at Mitre Peak) or serviced by satellite in remote areas that are closed off and require such long visits are

Plan Speed Down/Up Time/Limit Price
250 MB 8Mb / 512Kb* 7 Days $2.00
1 GB 8Mb / 512Kb* 7 Days $5.00
2 GB 8Mb / 512Kb* 7 Days $10.00
5 GB 8Mb / 512Kb* 7 Days $20.00
10 GB 8Mb / 512Kb* 7 Days $30.00
20 GB 8Mb / 512Kb* 7 Days $40.00

Which I think is pretty reasonable. The sites that are taking free we’re pushing them to 5GB per day with 10 devices. When running on UFB we try and dish out 20Mbps/5Mbps

Hotels tend to have wireless contracts (5 years approx) provided by their international headoffices and can range from 30 min or 8MB free with up to $60 dollars a day for a minimal amount of data.

Backpackers tend to put it out for free… which is ok if you sleep in backpackers.

Anyways, Fiber is coming out fast (irony and pun intended) which is nice. Motels are moving towards free as a service. These things do need to be managed and cats need to be fed… so I guess.. on we go.

We in the Hotspot industry and working hard with the tools we have to give the best service we can whilst feeding as many cats as possible. Happy, safe and fast travels readers 😉

I just got to Wellington last week and was also surprised by the lack of free wifi at the hostel and also the data rate on most of the cell providers here but I have a few updates.

The Global Gossip rates are $4 per day and $12 per week at the Base Backpackers and the speed doesn’t seem to be capped any more, my current speedtest.net results were 5.28 Mbps down and 2.89 Mbps up.

Also for mobile data check out Skinny – currently $26 a month for 1GB 300 min unlimited texts (NZ & Aus) with a $4 sim card.

Cheers,
B

One more update:

Comfort Hotel, Wellington: free and (apparently) unlimited; approximately 2-3mbps down and up but a bit variable. I gave up trying to do some work this morning when it slowed down and tethered to my phone (I was able to get a 4G signal with Spark in the room). I also just bought another 3GB of data for $49 with Spark… :O

The real reason I stopped back by, though, was to make another observation: I realize that NZ’s a long way and subsea cables are expensive, but that really can’t be a valid excuse.

I’m originally from Anchorage, Alaska, which is just about the same distance from Seattle as Sydney is from Auckland. We’ve got about 15% of the population in our state as NZ has (and spread out over six and a half times the area of NZ, too!), and yet we’ve got (to my knowledge) three separate subsea cables stretching the approximately 1,500 miles from the Last Frontier to the upper-left corner of the “Lower 48” US states with a total aggregate capacity of about 4.2Tbps. And while Alaskans complain about expensive and slow Internet, a reasonably decent Internet connection in Anchorage of 15Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up with 100GB of data transfer a month runs about $50 with the local cable company, and their top-tier plan (certainly sufficient for a motel/hotel of decent size) of 250Mbps down and 10Mbps up with 550GB of usage is $250/month. Even at the top end of the stable business-class connections, the company I used to work for up there had a 10Mbps/10Mbps (symmetric) G.SHDSL connection with truly unlimited data (and I’m sure we transferred at least a terabyte a month, if not more) was about $700/month.

All that translates to plenty of free wifi at hotels and at many businesses in the larger cities of Alaska (it’s obviously more of a challenge to provide Internet to rural communities, many of whom rely on satellite connections).

What I’m saying there is that Alaska’s in a similar situation of distance from the U.S. as NZ is from Australia, and even with a far smaller population to amortize the infrastructure over, we seem to get better prices and more free wifi availability there than you do here.

From reading I’ve done, the wholesale cost of 1 GB of data across the Southern Cross cable is about 2 cents. So if Zenbu is charging 10 cents a MB (and they still are, according to their splash screen) or $100 per GB, that’s simply criminal.

I think the telcos’ arguments that it’s limited/costly international capacity is mostly debunked now. I suspect it comes down to the providers in NZ just needing some competition and/or regulation to spur passing lower wholesale prices along to the local population.

Great update, thanks Chris!

I think your estimate of prices dropping and capacity increasing was a *little* optimistic (though not entirely). Here’s my data as of now, the beginning of November 2014 (a year and a half after this article was written):

-AKL airport: 30min free, no data cap AFAIK
-Spark (formerly Telecom NZ) SIM: $49 for 2GB 100min 100sms 1GB/day at payphone hotspots or $55 for 3GB (no payphone hotspot data included)
-Poenamo Hotel, Northcote: free and unlimited; a wobbly 2mbps down and 0.3mbps up but sometimes slower
-Castle Court Motel, Wellsford: free; 1GB; speeds decent (forgot to measure)
-Starbucks, Sylvia Park shopping centre, Auckland: wasn’t a customer so didn’t log in, but there was a voucher paywall (odd for a Starbucks!)
-Quality Hotel Ambassador, Hamilton: free; 500MB; 13mbps up AND down (FTTH)–too bad it’s so limited, as I was looking forward to taking care of some backups on this
-Supposedly McDonalds have free Internet; unsure of the quality and limits, if any

So it looks better than it was when you wrote the article, but there’s still a long way to go.

3 weeks to go. I’ll have to use your tips of looking for wifi at libraries and government buildings…

Quite a shock coming from South Korea, where my hotel had a 100mbps/100mbps unlimited connection (I suspect it was higher but for a 100mbps switch somewhere in the connection path)!

I’m actually planning on training the alpacas to deliver my emails in printed form. It’ll be faster, cheaper and easier than relying on the local Internet connections.

Thanks Steven.

Just checked out Zenbu’s website, and somehow it seems like they are still in business. Who would have thought??

I have another digital nomad friend who has spent the last couple of months there, and the country is still trailing behind the rest of the world. Let’s hope that all changes by the time Dave sets up his tiny house and mini alpaca farm there in 2016.