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Vodafone (and others) missing the point

Vodafone has attempted to convince the government that the minimum speed of the new UFB offering should be 100Mbps instead of the present 30Mbps.

This, says Vodafone, would only represent a minor increase in the total cost of the project but deliver significant gains to consumers.

What are you smoking Vodafone?

The real issues have far less to do with bandwidth than data-caps.

Whether a UFB connection is three times as fast as your ADSL one or ten times as fast is irrelevant if you're still stuck with a paltry 100GB data-cap. In fact, all a faster connection means is that you hit your cap earlier in the month.

I suspect that for most internet users, 30Mbps will be *more* than adequate for their needs, especially since if they were to actually use all that bandwidth, they'd hit their cap in less than 10 hours of use -- or 0.14% of a month.

As I've said before, unless data-caps are hugely expanded or dropped altogether, we're being sold a Ferrari with a one-litre fuel tank.

Yes, the speed and handling are very impressive -- but if you try to use all that power and performance for more than a few minutes, you'll find yourself either parked on the side of the road motionless -- or paying a fortune to have the tiny tank topped up at very regular intervals.

Right now the government seems so worried that people will prefer to stick with ADSL over UFB that they've making plans to artificially keep the price of the copper-based service higher than it should be (based on Commerce Commission valuation). They believe that the uptake of UFB will be unacceptably low if they don't distort the market by lowering the price-gap.

To be honest, I think that's the least of their worries right now.

The bigger problem will be the angry UFB users who, on having all that speed and power at their fingertips, hook up their smart TV sets or buy online video boxes that give them access to zetabytes or yottabytes of really good video-on-demand content.

By the time their first monthly UFB bill rolls around, they could find themselves staring at a huge debt. The UFB bill-shock could be almost as bad as the bill-shock associated with overseas roaming on your cellphone.

Perhaps *this* is why the government requires that when UFB is installed, the old copper is removed. Maybe they realise that unless datacaps are significantly upgraded to match the speed of the new service, many, many people may otherwise opt just to return to the more affordable ADSL option.

It would seem that the government have well and truly placed the cart before the horse when it comes to delivering *practical* ultra-fast broadband to the masses.

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