Written 8 January 2009
Okay, I was just wrapping up the last blog, discussing some of it with Ana, when we realized that I should make an entry for today. So while I will post this a couple of days after the previous, realize that it took place on our second full day in Australia, amidst apartment hunting in the big city. Now it is the same big city that I was saying that I wouldn’t enjoy as much, but I also said that I was keeping an open mind and meant that I would unabashedly embrace the good things.
Our great revelation was compounded by two factors. First, while many blessings have befallen Aotearoa, the internet has hardly recognized the place. In fact, some study that a coworker quoted me listed New Zealand as having the poorest internet structure of any developed nation. Any. How did they let Ireland or Portugal slip past them? Even the way you get internet there is different. It is not just a matter of downloading or uploading speed. Only the big companies, such as the hospital where I worked, had unlimited access and high speed. And by high speed, I mean relative to dial up. You will see what I mean in a minute. The rest of us outside of the corporate world purchase quantities of download per month. For example, we bought a middle-of-the-road program allowing three gigabytes of download at high speed for NZ$40 per month. More downloads would cost more, and the same download quantity at higher speed would cost more. A lot more.
And for clarification, 3 Gb is enough to handle all our emails, web brousing, facebooking, and iTunes downloads, almost. We still ran over a little a couple of months. But we couldn’t venture into videos much and had to avoid sites that kept spooling information to you, updating their information every few seconds. We also couldn’t pull up Youtube videos of Sesame Street and the like for Ryan.
The second factor in this compounding process that I alluded to is that nothing progresses like technology. Six months in New Zealand has let other lands carry on at breakneck speed.
Zoom in to the four of us strolling (actually three of us strolling and one in a tike-toting backpack) along the sidewalk in a high-rise section of North Sydney after seeing the last of the open viewings of apartments that we had listed for the day. We stopped into a computer store to get some opinions on internet connections, companies, the quality available, etc. The very pleasant Chinese fellow, the presumed owner, was happy to talk to us about it and gave us a brochure from one of the many providers in the area, one with which he was apparently associated, since a blank on the brochures application page for the provider representative had already been filled in with his name. The plan provided 50 Gb of warp-speed downloading of 20 Mbps for AU$50 (about US$30). “So what plan did you have in New Zealand?” he asked. We responded that we got 3 Gb of high speed download for NZ$40. “Thirty gigabytes?” he questioned, as though his Mandarin ears had misinterpreted my American accent. The look he gave when he counted the fingers I held up to correct him told us what we needed to know. Things were about to get a whole lot better.
Our great revelation was compounded by two factors. First, while many blessings have befallen Aotearoa, the internet has hardly recognized the place. In fact, some study that a coworker quoted me listed New Zealand as having the poorest internet structure of any developed nation. Any. How did they let Ireland or Portugal slip past them? Even the way you get internet there is different. It is not just a matter of downloading or uploading speed. Only the big companies, such as the hospital where I worked, had unlimited access and high speed. And by high speed, I mean relative to dial up. You will see what I mean in a minute. The rest of us outside of the corporate world purchase quantities of download per month. For example, we bought a middle-of-the-road program allowing three gigabytes of download at high speed for NZ$40 per month. More downloads would cost more, and the same download quantity at higher speed would cost more. A lot more.
And for clarification, 3 Gb is enough to handle all our emails, web brousing, facebooking, and iTunes downloads, almost. We still ran over a little a couple of months. But we couldn’t venture into videos much and had to avoid sites that kept spooling information to you, updating their information every few seconds. We also couldn’t pull up Youtube videos of Sesame Street and the like for Ryan.
The second factor in this compounding process that I alluded to is that nothing progresses like technology. Six months in New Zealand has let other lands carry on at breakneck speed.
Zoom in to the four of us strolling (actually three of us strolling and one in a tike-toting backpack) along the sidewalk in a high-rise section of North Sydney after seeing the last of the open viewings of apartments that we had listed for the day. We stopped into a computer store to get some opinions on internet connections, companies, the quality available, etc. The very pleasant Chinese fellow, the presumed owner, was happy to talk to us about it and gave us a brochure from one of the many providers in the area, one with which he was apparently associated, since a blank on the brochures application page for the provider representative had already been filled in with his name. The plan provided 50 Gb of warp-speed downloading of 20 Mbps for AU$50 (about US$30). “So what plan did you have in New Zealand?” he asked. We responded that we got 3 Gb of high speed download for NZ$40. “Thirty gigabytes?” he questioned, as though his Mandarin ears had misinterpreted my American accent. The look he gave when he counted the fingers I held up to correct him told us what we needed to know. Things were about to get a whole lot better.
Bill Gates. NOT a Kiwi.
No comments:
Post a Comment