New Zealand Broadband Services Represent Poor Value for Customers

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New Zealand Broadband Services Represent Poor Value for Customers

2:45 pm on May 30, 2006 | Category: Business, Telecom Services, Internet

Executive director, Keith Davidson, of the Internet New Zealand consumer advocacy group has released a report examining New Zealand’s poor broadband internet speeds, and calling for ISPs to abolish restrictive bandwidth caps on their high speed internet services.

“The research report we are releasing today shows that current Kiwi broadband offerings just don’t measure up,” Davidson commented.

In particular, the report examines broadband services from 388 ISPs in 26 industrialized countries and ranks New Zealand as 22nd for overall customer value. Although most providers in the country offer reasonable prices and reliability, highly restrictive data caps limit the efficiency of their offerings.

“Most alarming from the report is the clearly out-of-step position of New Zealand in respect of data caps. Data caps are just not common practice across the OECD, and as outlined by an OECD official at the TUANZ Telecommunications Day on 24 May they create a real and serious constraint on the uses to which broadband internet connections can be put,” Davidson explained.

The report also drew parallels between the country’s bandwidth caps and its low overall broadband penetration. Lower bandwidth speeds obviously provide less incentive for dialup users to make the move to higher speed services, and it’s quite clear that this is the case in the New Zealand market.

Providers will need to increase speeds considerably if they hope to win over more users and increase their overall market reach.