I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
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We can talk all we like about New Zealand New Thinking, being part of the global economy, blah blah - but where the rubber meets the road is what overseas influencer’s say about us. That drives investment and opportunity.
Noticed by Rowan, what the experts said when they arrived home after the excellent Webstock event last week.
Missing Wellington; enjoying good Internet
While, Tom Coates, back in San Francisco is missing Wellington:
Reliable internet access is a boon, otherwise quite missing Wellington.
Michael Lopp’s enjoying having a decent Internet connection:
Sweet sweet broadband
If we want to brand ourselves as an innovative, connected country a concrete aspect of developing this brand is our infrastructure. We can’t hide from that.
blog
add this from
http://www.molly.com/2008/02/16/one-very-phishy-reason-to-love-ie7/
“I’ve been in a wonderful hotel here in Wellington, New Zealand alas, with the crappiest connectivity ever”
Seems to me this is really up to the conference organizers. Wellington homes and offices have excellent internet by anyone’s standards. When I visit people in the US I’m usually disappointed by their home internet compared to what we have available here.
The internet at FOO was crap this year compared to last year too. Just unusable much of the time.
Totally agree, but on the flip side, try driving for more than 5 minutes around San Fran/Bay area without dropping your mobile phone call.
An explanation as to why the WebStock guest internet connectivity wasn’t a great experience can be found here:
http://www.publicaddress.net/default,4813.sm#post4813
The first four comments are all relevant, but for me they miss the point of the post: our internet quality is part of our brand.
It doesn’t matter how or why these people experienced poor connectivity or how it compares to other cities/countries. People take their experience to form an attitude or emotional response to a product/company/city/nation.
For some, the internet might be a small and unimportant component of NZ’s brand, but for Webstock guests and speakers, it’s likely to be more of a factor. It’s telling that so many of the high profile speakers focused on the internet during/immediately after their visit.
I guess it’s all in the context. Rod appears to be saying that because a few high profile speakers had a singular bad internet connectivity experience, that this has tainted the entire New Zealand techie brand.
Whereas I’m thinking/hoping that they and their readers may put it down to a one off experience, one that is repeated in many hotels across the US.
And now to contradict myself, there’s been many a time in the bay area when the GSM signal fades between Los Gatos and Mountain View that I’ve thought - “the seppos just don’t get mobile phones do they …”
Brand is all about promise - what’s the promise that we make and how we deliver to that promise.
It’s got to be ‘wired in’ to what we do. And it’s not how we perceive it, its how its perceived by the people that are the recipients of that promise. I posted on this a couple of days ago http://szikszai.blogspot.com/2008/02/you-are-brand.html in the sense of what you do on a day to day basis - it still applies here.
In NZ we promise a fantastic environment, innovation and creativity - all from a geographically separated environment. To Dave’s point, the speakers at webstock are a part of who we make the Brand NZ promise to. They might be techies but they are also tourists. And they are the influencers who help get our message of creativity and innovation out to the rest of the world.
We don’t have good broadband as part of our NZ brand at the moment (or if we promise it, we don’t deliver it). To substantiate our other promises of creativity and innovation we need it, otherwise these are at risk of not being delivered.
Anyone got to the Local Government session today focussed on this?
Totally in agreement with Miki. Broadband needs to feature in NZ’s brandmap.
Fast, reliable and cheap broadband connection is a must to compete for certain industries. Hopefully in the near future the govt will start looking to attract new industries such as the i-gaming but then again without fast connectivity it will backfire. Other countries are already getting dividends out of their investments. Or will it end up too little too late?
The first four comments are all relevant, but for me they miss the point of the post: our internet quality is part of our brand
I don’t see how I missed the point. I said that Wellington has great internet available, so if that wasn’t evident to the conference-goers then the fault can be laid squarely at the feet of the conference organizers who would seem to have let us all down a little.
This was forgivable at FOO, which was free, but WebStock was what? $1000ish?
Spot-on. I’m often embarrassed that my overseas customers have broadband times faster than mine. A user from a small Scottish town beats me to uploading large files to a server located 7.5km from where I am.
Here is a punt I took at a post on TC some days ago.
Look at the following comment - it notes the lifestyle and … the shitty broadband in Nelson :-)
the issue here is hotel and public internet access outside of your own home
home broadband is not too bad, mine through ihug is very good, and at my old house we had telstra (saturn) cable and it was very good
but hotel internet in nz is very very poor, and often very expensive
and there’s too few easy/cheap options for public internet access
that’s where places like the states and asia beat us hands down
and that’s why visitors eg these conference attendees go back muttering about our backward internet service
This is off topic, but where abouts were you sitting at Webstock Bruce? On the first day the wireless was terrible, but on the second it was fine. My understanding is that Cafenet (or Citylink, or whoever was providing the wireless) upped the capacity on day two at the demand of the orgainisers and attendees. Unfortunately, the speakers I spoke to had awful connectivity at the hotel they were at, which was the most frustrating thing for them as they had work to do. At least they haven’t all left saying it was a crappy conference, quite the opposite in fact and that’s a huge plus for Wellington.
I also disagree that “Wellington homes and offices have excellent internet by anyone’s standards”. My connection in the UK several years ago was umlimited download, no fixed term, and a 4Mbit connection, for about 20 quid. Here we have ludicrous downloads limits, terrible upload speeds, and it’s only recently started to get cheaper. I don’t like to knock NZ, but we have room to improve on this.
If you have bad internet in Wellington today then that’s purely your own choice causing it.
At home I’ve had 4 Mbps down/ 2 Mbps up for several years, and a while back switched to 10 Mbps down. At work we have 4 Mbps down/4 Mbps up peak rates at I think a 64 kbps committed average for I think $150/month.
I very much doubt that you really had unlimited download at 4 Mbps for UKP20/month. That sort of guaranteed bandwidth costs serious dollar and I can guarantee you that if you actually started to use it in any kind of “unlimited” way (e.g. 100+ GB/month) then your ISP would have been having words with you very quickly. Here in NZ my cable modem account is truly unlimited. I can download just as much as I want, just as fast as I want, and I send TelstraClear $1.50 for each GB. This makes them happy, and it makes me happy too.
There are ISPs on DSL (xnet) who have as good or bette deals if you don’t mind the (admittedly bad) DSL upload speeds. But that’s inherent to DSL — they’ll sell you full line speed up, but they can’t make it faster than the gear is designed to do.
See the NZ Chello experience for what “unlimited at fixed price” means for customers. In a word it means crap.
“If you have bad internet in Wellington today then that’s purely your own choice causing it.”
You may be able to afford high speed internet; good on you. Many cannot, and that is not a choice, that is a reality that many kiwis face. Friends of mine with bigger mortgages, or more children, or in lower paying jobs are still on dial up, because it’s all they feel they can afford. There is definitely room for improvement.
In the apartment block I lived in in London, there were several unsecured networks with strong signals; we often connected to them unwittingly. No one took the trouble to secure them because no one cared about bandwidth limits. If there were limits we never encountered them (and the 4 antipodeans living in my flat downloaded a fair bit).
So poor they are on dial up?
You mean they pay Telecom $43.60 a month for a *phone line*!!!??? And probably $10 a month on top of that to an ISP?
I spend $50 a month, total, for 10 GB of broadband (and nothing on a phone line, I use Skype and SkypeOut when needed). Check my arithmetic, but that’s less.
‘Wellington homes and offices have excellent internet by anyone’s standards’
you are joking right
at the moment telstra clear connectivity is so pathetic for everyone in wellington, most people have either a $10 of $20 credit each month.
I think the travellers were referring to hotel “broadband” and “wifi” - over priced and patchy. One of the reasons we’re doing TheFreeNet in Wellington CBD.
TelstraClear has excellent Internet performance in my suburb, last time I ran http://www.speedtest.net, I got 9777 kb/s down, 2027 kb/s up, on the cable modem.
Shame about their customer service though, not untypical to wait 45-60 minutes in the queue, then have a techie guy try to convince me it is my PC, my router, etc, rather than their network misconfiguration. But visitors don’t encounter that particular problem.
Not that anyone is probably reading this now, but I can confirm that I’ve just had a truly crappy wireless experience at the Carlyle Suites in Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley. Drop outs, no connects, I was eventually forced into the car park to steal someones unsecured connection - thanks appleeb341!!
Now San Jose airports wifi is flying! (pun really not intended …
C