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The show will likely screen here early next year so keep your eyes peeled.

While away, I was also able to sign the heads of agreement for an exciting high-technology deal with a US company, the details of which are presently covered by an NDA but will be revealed in a just little while. Suffice to say that a good whack of overseas investment and the creation of new jobs is involved. I have no doubt that our Minister for Economic Development will be beaming when the full details are made public.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be pretty busy shifting house -- having sold-up to finance the R&D work that lead to last week's deal -- but I'll try not to let this affect the publication of Aardvark Daily.

The crazy thing about moving is that my new home will be further away from the big smoke, yet it will allow me to gain DSL connectivity -- go figure.

And speaking of DSL connectivity... although my access to the Net was very limited while I was away, due mainly to a lack of time, I did get the chance to use a really fast DSL connection with extremely low latency.

Oh boy, does having such a really high-speed connection make the web a whole different place or what?

I recall making a similar comment a few years ago when I started using ihug's high-speed satellite service (which is a giant leap up from dial-up) but believe me, having megabits per second at your fingertips, with a direct connection to a major US backbone -- that's speed!

If we had widespread, truly affordable, uncapped, *real* broadband here in NZ I suspect that levels of local audio and video production would go through the roof.

Here's an idea for Telecom -- how about you give us a low-cost DSL package that includes true, uncapped flat-rate broadband data rates (we're talking megabits per second here) for locally hosted sites with capped and/or throttled speeds (say 128Kbps) for international sites?

This would foster the creation of locally hosted broadband content by making access to it affordable to all Kiwis, whilst not relinquishing the ability to control/recover the costs associated with servicing international bandwidth.

Given that Telecom are currently revamping their DSL offerings, perhaps they will be giving us such an option -- here's hoping.

Unfortunately, I suspect that the local recording and music industries might bitch wildly about the availability of such a service, since it would be a godsend for those illegally trading copyrighted material. Perhaps the regular P2P ports could also be throttled if it turned out that file-traders were abusing the service.

Yes, there are technical issues -- but they should not be unsolvable, and besides, that's why Telecom gets the big-bucks, right?

If any Aardvark readers want to share an opinion on today's column or add something, you're invited to chip in and have your say in The Aardvark Forums or, if you prefer, you can contact me directly.

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