NZ broadband like budget Big Mac without extras

A Big Mac may cost less in New Zealand than it does in the United Kingdom but, when the price is used to compare broadband services, the British burgers are bigger and more filling, a study has found.

"They also come with extra pickle," said Andy Williamson, managing director of information and communications technology research firm Wairua Consulting, which compiled the data.

The study used the Economist's famous Big Mac index, which compares the price of the McDonald's hamburger around the world to define purchasing-power parity.

He said the method might appear "flippant", but it was an accepted economic measure easily applied to broadband services.

Only one country was used in the comparison for simplicity's sake and New Zealand often took its lead from the UK in policy matters.

In comparing packages offered as of the end of February, the study found that New Zealanders generally pay less for broadband but get inferior services.

Download speeds, upload speeds and data restrictions were all worse.

Less than 1 per cent of UK broadband packages offered download speeds of 256 kilobits per second, compared with 38 per cent in New Zealand. The highest speed offered here was 2 megabits per second, compared with 22 megabits in the UK. The UK has upload speeds up to 2 megabits, compared with 128 kilobits here.

Williamson said New Zealand's price advantage was also superficial because customers here tended to rack up additional charges once they exceeded their limits. About 63 per cent of UK broadband packages have unlimited data usage, while all New Zealand packages have caps.

Williamson, who is a member of the Government's Digital Strategy Advisory Group, said other arguments, particularly a recently published survey by Business New Zealand that found services here compared well internationally, were fraught with errors.

"If you think of a research report as an academic assignment, if you turned that academic assignment into me, you would have got an F," Williamson said.