New Zealand Gold Prospecting & Metal Detecting Forums Archive

And risk getting a 3 strikes letter from your ISP. If you are going to do it via a torrent then use something like BitGuard to hide your address.

the southern cross cable is a problem alright. the sooner it has competition the better.

if everyone got a few strikes the enforcers would be very busy for a very long time. hard to fight something that everyone is doing that's for sure.

i think the big shots losing out are behind a bit of a media campaign to scare the average folk in a way similar to the fear induced by insurance companies that encourages people to insure against nearly everything.

in a perfect world if everyone subscribed to the likes of sky it would get cheaper and cheaper the more users they had. i feel this would be on something like a Tui beer billboard. companies like telecom spring to mind. they used to have the whole monopoly on communications in new zealand and look at all the favours they did us all.

i personally never have had a notice. the day i do i will use something to hide my iso.

2nd notice i will throw my tv out the window.

just out of interest i note the special price for a couple to go to the movies lately, including some included snacks to juice up the deal was nearly $40 for 2 people!.

the digital age has changed the game and business needs to adapt their business model rather than fight it. the core reason people love to hate these types of companies is the milk it beyond belief. look at how much the govt gave us movie companies to get a handful of blockbusters made in nz. about $87 per person. and to top it off they won't disclose exactly how huge the tax breaks were to get these guys here in the first place. double screwed! yeah for good old new zealand. no matter which way you look at it we're getting screwed.

don't get me started on the rest of it like power, and food. all i hear from tourists is how expensive nz is. and they come from many different countries.
nz sure ain't like it was when my parents or grandparents grew up.

i think they call it corruption. and nz was recently listed as the least corrupt country i believe!

Hi Guys,

The problem here in New Zealand is that the majority of the available copper network (for Telephone and Internet) is owned by a single company (that the government sold off long ago), the government do have some limited control over the pricing by means of legislation around the access fees that that vendor charges to your internet provider from time to time.

Latest news on that topic:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/d...s-swipe-at-latest-review

Fiber doesn't really solve this problem, as it's still the same vendor setting the price and speed wise (based on available plans) about the same as a quality copper broadband connection. The only noticeable benefit appears to be isn't inability to short circuit like copper does.

The international link(s) have plenty of vacant capacity thanks to the magic of technologies such as wavelength-division multiplexing, from what I understand it's not unreasonably priced too - although your internet provider may have considered this as a way to improve there margins, and kept the same old poor contention ratio.

Solution: Introduce some real local competition, the price war that follows between the vendors to bring on numbers will do far more than the government can with legislation. That and more generous contention ratios from your provider will move us forward.

I work for an internet company, which one I will leave out of this - as I am not saying this to push a product. One thing to stress however is that the most significant component of what you pay any provider gets passed on to the vendor.

As for the legality of watching shows that aren't available in New Zealand, it's a darn shame the media companies mostly appear to employ lawyers - a technologist would have seen the gaping hole begging to be filled and implemented a streaming service for a affordable fee, caching the content locally using one of the many content delivery solutions available. I wouldn't mind paying for content that I have no alternative legitimate way of accessing - and I suspect the same applies to most of us?

One can't be careful enough protecting themselves even for the most legitimate uses of the internet (like downloading the latest version of Ubuntu from TPB), as such I would recommend installing something like PeerBlock and subscribing to the 'Level 1' list to protect yourself from being served or serving data to corporations that really have no place monitoring what you do (in there sneaky ways). That's the business of the local officials accompanied with search warrants when they have genuine reason to believe your endangering others.

All in all, Internet Providers aren't as evil as the price makes them appear (usually), light travels at 299,792,458m/s making the distance to other parts of the world near meaningless if you're data traversing an optical fiber (~34ms to the USA from New Zealand, the same time as sending data locally over copper), mindless corporate monopoly is bad.

Oh, and thanks for providing a place for me to rant and reading this far ;)

Edited by user Saturday, 16 February 2013 1:06:39 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Thanks again, I really look forward to seeing these. I like Bering Sea gold the best, man I would love to have dredged some of that back when I was dredging. NUGGY