Internet speed is changing our way of life

Carl Penwarden has ditched his TV and now uses his computer for video, music and phone calls. Picture / Mark Mitchell

Carl Penwarden is living what he calls the "quadruple play lifestyle" and he's loving it.

Gone - mainly via Trade Me - are the television, video recorder, DVD player, stereo and landline from the central Wellington townhouse he shares with his wife.

Now the couple get all their music, news and entertainment, and most of their phone calls through a 1 gigabit-per-second fibre-optic connection capable of pumping a torrent of data onto their home computer and laptop.

While most of us still marvel at the benefits of having a 1 or 2 megabit per second ADSL connection powering our internet experience, Penwarden is mainlining in an experiment 1,000 times faster and designed to show how access to unfettered bandwidth can change your life.

Nice for some. Penwarden is development manager for Wellington network operator CityLink and happens to live on The Terrace, alongside the company's super-fast fibre-optic link from the central business district to the University.

A clever internet-based link lets him take calls to his landline number on a wireless phone, which he can take with him across the CBD where his calls follow him thanks to CityLink's CafeNET wireless network.

Penwarden is rapt about life without a traditional TV, saying global video-on-demand services allow him to catch most of his favourite shows, often well ahead of their New Zealand debut.

His new viewing habits have also exposed him to other interesting programmes that will never appear on our screens.

The sports enthusiast can take his pick from "niche TV" channels from around the world - a favourite is www.cycling.tv.

Penwarden managed to chew through 66 gigabytes of data watching TVNZ's live streaming video of the Commonwealth Games during the 11 days of competition in March.

"If I'd been a Jetstream customer and had watched that same amount of TV it would have cost $669.95," he says.

The only thing that irks Penwarden about his downloader's heaven is that it is reliant on overseas operators.

"If you look across all of those services I'm getting there are not many local examples," he says.

"There's not a New Zealand equivalent to Skype. There's not a New Zealand video download store. There's not a New Zealand niche TV station I'm aware of yet. But in all of those areas there are international companies from countries that are ahead of us that have seen those opportunities and are taking them."

This means local businesses - and internet consumers - are missing out.

"The reason they're not here is that we've got slow broadband, we've got low broadband penetration and the incumbent [Telecom] is controlling the majority of the market at the moment. The problem with all of that is that we're going to continue to be left behind," Penwarden says.

His boss, CityLink managing director Neil de Wit, says Penwarden's super-connected lifestyle "underpins the premise of what more bandwidth into the home can and will actually mean".

De Wit says restrictive data caps as well as sluggish internet speeds are prohibiting Penwarden's experience from becoming the norm.

"With the current data caps your quota gets consumed in hours," de Wit says.

De Wit and Penwarden agree the Government's decision to force Telecom to unbundle its local loop will open up new local internet services through better competition.

But they feel that, to a large extent, we've missed the boat.

While Telecom is touting the arrival of a much faster technology, ADSL2+, later this year as a major advancement in internet speeds (up to 24 megabits) Penwarden says other countries are already selling fibre-optic services more than twice that speed.

Part of the issue seems to be that New Zealand lacks service providers with the marketing muscle to impart a vision of the benefits a high-speed broadband utopia can offer.

Michael Carney, media strategist for advertising planning agency MediaCom, describes Telecom's Xtra-ordinaries broadband campaign as a desperate attempt to push broadband sales through its wholesale partners to meet its obligations to the Government.

Despite the four geeks' best televised efforts, Telecom fell short of the wholesale target, creating one of the many nails in its unbundling coffin.

"It's the kind of campaign you'd do when you can't really say anything about the product without either misrepresenting it or over-promising and under-delivering," Carney says of the Xtra-ordinaries TV ads.

"It misses the boat in terms of what really are the benefits of broadband," he says.

"[It should be] all about - in the theoretical world at least - speed of usage, which in turn improves productivity if you're running a small business or a home office, and gives you access to information faster, and video if you're a home entertainment user."

Carney says the marketing of broadband is now in a kind of hiatus as we wait for unbundling to happen, at which point we can look forward to some "reasonable and respectable offerings" as competition heats up.

In the meantime he remains unimpressed by the sell-jobs of all of the ISPs.

"As a heavy user of broadband I would respond well to a campaign which sold me on the benefits of getting fast internet through a particular supplier because of X benefit and Y benefit and Z benefit but nobody's doing that," he says.