Kim Dotcom’s plan to give New Zealanders free Internet could just work

http://thenextweb.com/au/2012/11/18/kim-dotcoms-plan-to-give-new-zealanders-free-internet-could-just-work/?fromcat=all

by Cbasedlifeform • 14 years ago

127 46 14 years ago

corin_• 14 years ago

> 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...) 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• 14 years ago

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

tgb• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

Cbasedlifeform2• 14 years ago

Apologies for that.

kristofferR• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

> 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.

georgeorwell• 14 years ago

What if the votes and comments on duplicate URLs got merged and the story clock was set to the latest one?

DanBC2• 14 years ago

The new url was caught by the duplicate filter.

The poster of this new article added ?fromcat=all to the end of the url to evade the filter.

It's gently infuriating.

I'm not sure what the answer should be. People should submit less? Should only submit great articles form good sources? More people should follow new and flag the dross and upvote the great articles. I dunno.

Perhaps banning any filter evasion that isn't ?repost=1; ?repost=2 etc might help. At least then people could easily see how often this had been reposted.

Cbasedlifeform2• 14 years ago

To be clear, I did not knowingly try to spoof or "evade" the URL filter. I'll look out for this issue in the future however.

Please don't accuse me of doing it on purpose, however!

quantumstate• 14 years ago

If I go the thenextweb homepage and click the link to the article I get the url with ?fromcat=all. Banning a user because they copied a url directly is not a good solution. Many websites put some extra information in the url.

plg• 14 years ago

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

Breakthrough2• 14 years ago

"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...

aes256• 14 years ago

The article is presumably referring to a transfer rate of 2 terabits per second, not 2 terabits of data transferred over the course of 24 hours.

2Tbps for a country of 4.5m people sounds about right.

Breakthrough2• 14 years ago

I thought that initially, but they mention in the article "2 terabits of daily bandwidth", which I assumed to be a metric of per unit-time. Furthermore, I found a graph detailing internet usage per user per month for various countries [1].

If we take New Zealand to be equivalent to the North American average (higher than the European average) of 14.5 GiB/user-month, and apply that to the 2.6 million internet connected people in New Zealand, this equates to an average bandwidth of 14.5 GiB/sec, or around 116 gigabits per second.

The only way you can get close to 2 terabits per second is to assume all of those 2.6 million people use 256 gigabytes of bandwidth per month - and certainly, I don't think that the people in NZ use ten to twenty times as much bandwidth as the other countries in the world [1]. (Other assumptions: 30 days in a month, and all of the 66% internet connected population in NZ uses 14.5 GiB per month)

[1] http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0912/

thechut• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

Cogito• 14 years ago

Just FYI, this is not strictly true. Most internet plans are metered, however you can often find a plan that includes unlimited downloads (and that does not shape bandwidth).

For example, see [1].

It is still typical for plans to be graded by the download cap, and for a time there seemed to be no unlimited download plans available, however this situation is being disrupted by ISPs like TPG. They are almost certainly overselling their bandwidth, but my personal experience is quite good with consistent fast downloads even when downloading terrabytes of data in a month (I lived in a student share house).

[1] http://www.tpg.com.au/products_services/adsl2-standalone

jconnop• 14 years ago

They've obviously got their units messed up in that section. I used 99GiB yesterday, and I'm fairly sure I don't account for over a third of my country's bandwidth usage :)

herge• 14 years ago

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.

icebraining• 14 years ago

Why? If the bandwidth costs differently to the ISP - and it probably does - it seems much more reasonable to offer the choice to the consumer instead of averaging the costs.

Here in Portugal we used to have three tiers (international, national and intra-ISP, the latter of which was unlimited) and what happen in that some developers forked Emule to give it per-ISP and national filters, which you could configure independently.

It was very useful even for legal but bigger content, like game demos or patches - a single person would download it from abroad and then share it locally. A single cap would be much worse for everyone.

marquis2• 14 years ago

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-...

lostlogin4• 14 years ago

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.

Negitivefrags• 14 years ago

Yes, for residential plans they abolished the National / International pricing for a fixed rate across both, but for servers in data centers they still have National vs International pricing. For example: http://www.net24.co.nz/dedicated-servers/

I don't know where you got the idea that all traffic goes out of the country and back in again. That is just false.

lancewiggs• 14 years ago

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...

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• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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. :]

javajosh• 14 years ago

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

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

olalonde2• 14 years ago

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!

brendonjohn2• 14 years ago

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...

olalonde2• 14 years ago

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.

shabble• 14 years ago

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.

Kim Dotcom’s plan to give New Zealanders free Internet could just work

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