Going Mobile
New Zealand Listener|June 16-22 2018

Kiwi-Aussie rivalry plays out in typical win-some, lose-some fashion in the internet access world.

Peter Griffin
Going Mobile

A few weeks ago in Sydney, I did an interview with ABC Radio about the dire state of Australia’s broadband. The country’s National Broadband Network has been a disaster technically, financially and politically – a failure of leadership that has crippled a piece of infrastructure critical to the country’s economic development.

It was nice to contrast that debacle with the success here of the ultrafast broadband network, which has given a big boost to internet connection speeds all over the country. We are using much more data – on average 250GB (gigabytes) a month for users of fibre last year. As a result, about two-thirds of broadband plans are now “unlimited” – they have no monthly download cap.

That is as it should be – you shouldn’t have to think about how much data you are using in the age of ultra-high-definition video streaming. But what about broadband on your mobile?

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