KEY POINTS:
How embarrassing - New Zealand's poor performance in the international broadband stakes has been found out and noted in an overseas business magazine.
An "unexpected laggard" is how the Economist described us last month for a rate of broadband uptake that remains below the OECD average (Italy and Ireland are slightly worse off than us).
This is bad, the magazine points out, because whereas past economic success depended on being able to efficiently transport people, goods and electricity, fast internet services are today's facilitator of economic expansion.
Funny how this is news to the Economist - New Zealanders have been long aware of our laggardness. We've known about it from the time the Knowledge Wave conference first informed us that future prosperity lay in exporting the products of our brains, not our freezing works.
Broadband connections in the 30 OECD countries grew 24 per cent last year, the Economist reports, to 221 million. About a third of the populations of the best-performing countries have broadband, compared with New Zealand's rate, which is about half that.
Could this year see an improvement in New Zealand's ranking? On the basis of past experience, you wouldn't have to be a cynic to say no. But a few things happened last year that should start bearing fruit for ever-patient internet users.
For one thing, the division of Telecom into three businesses began and its new network company, Chorus, starts operations at the end of March.
For another, the much-heard phrase "local loop unbundling" took on real meaning when Telecom, after finally being prevailed on by the Government, allowed a handful of competitors to run trials of their equipment in a handful of its exchanges.
I can offer first-hand impressions of how this is going, having been hooked up to an Orcon ADSL2+ box at the Ponsonby exchange in Auckland since last November.
ADSL2+ has a theoretical maximum download speed of about 24 megabits a second, about five times the best that could be expected of the first generation of DSL services (ADSL2+ is third-generation technology).
My experience is that there's a big gap between theory and practice. Broadband speed tests I've done using various tools available online consistently show a download rate of 5Mbit/s. That's not a dramatic improvement on the 4Mbit/s I was already getting as a subscriber to Orcon's standard broadband offering.
The biggest boost I'm getting from ADSL2+ is a much faster upload speed - close to 1Mbit/s, compared with the 160kbit/s of the standard Orcon plan I subscribe to. Of course, you don't need ADSL2+ to get faster upload speeds. You just need to be prepared to pay slightly more for the premium service.
Scott Bartlett, the boss of Orcon, is surprised ADSL2+ isn't knocking my socks off. His home is connected to the Ponsonby exchange as well and he gets download speeds of about 15Mbit/s.
Performance is dependent to a large extent on distance from the exchange. As the crow flies, I'm about 2km from the Ponsonby exchange, while Bartlett is less than 1km away.
But he doesn't think that accounts for the whole difference between his speed and mine. Another important factor, he says, is the device, loosely called a modem, that connects your computer to the phone line.
The modem he is using, and which Orcon will be supplying to ADSL2+ subscribers when it begins selling the service in February, is a cut above the trial Linksys device I have.
I've been promised one will be turning up on the doorstep any day.
Another gap between theory and practice familiar to habitual downloaders is that files seldom arrive at the rate that your connection speed says they could.
Bartlett says Orcon's network is engineered to lessen that gap, and my experience bears that out - a recent 400 megabyte software update took barely 10 minutes to download.
That's hardly blindingly fast, but network speed is only part of the explanation. If the file you're downloading is in hot demand, the computer hosting it could be straining under the load.
The other part of ADSL2+'s promise is a range of clever voice services. Of those I've had not a glimpse, with only sporadic dial tone available to me over my trial line. Bartlett assures me that when the company's ADSL2+ service goes on sale it will include sophisticated voice calling. Orcon's isn't the only ADSL2+ game in town. Ihug (soon to be absorbed into the Vodafone brand), and to a lesser extent CallPlus, are also gearing up to provide the new service. And Telecom has quietly equipped 90 of its 120 exchanges with ADSL2+ gear.
The Economist might have gone on to report that it's neither brains nor freezing works that are propping up the economy at present, but the national dairy herd.
Maybe we won't be waiting quite till the cows come home for the affordable, fast internet access we know we need.
* Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland-based technology journalist.
