Ah, Stephen Fry – a modern British icon if ever there was one. On one hand polite, dapper and charming, on the other an uber geek capable of operating multiple devices and striking heart into business oligarchies with just one tweet:

[New Zealand] has probably the worst broadband I’ve ever encountered. Turns itself off, slows to a crawl. Pathetic

He’s right of course – at my abode I’m lucky to get 1MB/s to anything offshore in the evening making it practically impossible to keep an FTP connection alive whilst working on a client website overseas.

It always amazed me that New Zealanders were seen as quite such voracious downloaders and ‘kings of the pirates’ when internet access for many is expensive, often capped, shaped and crammed into one tiny pipe out to the world.

I’ve been meaning to call my ISP for many weeks to request a line test on the old copper to see if there’s any chance of a useful connection but the truth is I feel sorry for them – how many others are calling up moaning and whining about slow internet?

And it’s not because NetSafe is partly funded by InternetNZ, on the contrary, I would strongly support the national desire for better, faster, more sleek and sexy internet for all.

Yes, in the UK “supermarket chain Tesco offers an unlimited 250 megabytes-per-second- plan for $4.70 a month” but that’s because there are 70 million people crammed into a space the size of NZ (and half a million more move there every year).

The reality of course is we are down at the bottom of the world a long way from anywhere and there aren’t that many of us to pay for the shiny new pipes to will bring digital salvation. I do hope that doesn’t put off the plans to bring a new international cable though – it’s just that we’ll all have to pay for it (without moaning).

Fry can go home to the UK once the Hobbit is packed up and continue to entertain his millions of followers. Those running New Zealand ISPs though must have a difficult choice to make: invest mega millions of dollars into new equipment and pray there’s a return on investment that covers the bills and the salaries (and the shareholders champagne) before some new whizzy technology comes along and makes the one purchased and rolled out irrelevant and obsolete.

Just look at the iPad – in the US people are now rushing to offload their barely used iPad2s before iteration3 is launched and the second hand values plummet further and all they’ll get will probably be a better camera….

And I haven’t even touched on the regulatory issues ISPs face around content, privacy, copyright and security/safety of the end user.

In some nations (perhaps just Finland?) internet access is seen as a basic human right – an essential utility as ubiquitous as water and electricity. Those two can be delivered fairly simply: make sure the water and  power keeps flowing and doesn’t kill anyone when they use your product.

For internet service providers I’d argue their business is anything but simple – not only do you have to keep the www ‘flowing’, you also need to think about a multitude of factors where as the provider you’re very close nowadays to being blamed for the actions of your customers.

I can’t help but think that some day internet access will no longer be open and uncaptureable, we’ll all get our www from a central government supplier who watches our every move and ‘keeps us safe’. Maybe I’ve been watching too many sci-fi films (and raised in the UK).

All I know is, for now, we should be thankful we can have the kind of debates that one little tweet provoked. Right. Back to starting that upload again…

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