New Zealand now boasts over a million broadband subscribers. However, more than 400,000 internet users still rely on dial-up connections.
According to Statistics New Zealand’s latest ISP Survey, there were 1.13 million broadband subscribers in New Zealand as at the end of June – an increase of 27% compared to 15 months earlier when the last survey was conducted in March 2008.
This means broadband subscribers now make up nearly three-quarters of New Zealand’s total of 1,565,100 internet subscribers. While this increase in broadband uptake is great, the flipside is that over 25% of New Zealand internet subscribers are still languishing in dial-up purgatory.
This is definitely an area that needs improvement if New Zealand is going to reap the benefits of better connectivity and become a contender in the digital age.
Another area where New Zealand can do better as highlighted in the survey is data caps. The survey did find that the number of broadband subscribers with a data cap of 20GB or more tripled to 126,000 in the 15 months between the two surveys.
However, it also found that half of all broadband subscribers still have a data allowance of less than 5GB, and that the number of subscribers with no data caps actually reduced from eight percent in March 2008 to just six percent in June 2009.
The news was better in terms of download speed with most subscribers now able to get speeds of between 1.5Mbps and 24Mbps, which accounted for four out of five broadband users.
The number of subscribers with an upload speed of at least 512kbps more than doubled to 430,000.
Meanwhile the number of subscribers using mobile data cards, cable, or satellite technology to connect to the internet increased by 53 percent to 220,000. These users make up one-fifth of the total number of broadband users, according to Statistics New Zealand.
DSL was the most common broadband connection type and accounted for 77 percent of all broadband subscriptions. But fibre is still the least common connection type.
Statistics New Zealand says the survey will be now conducted annually each June in order to produce internationally comparable statistics, and stated that more information about individual use of the internet will be available next April.
The results from this survey show that there is a definite demand among Kiwis for faster broadband connectivity. Broadband uptake would undoubtedly have been even better during the past 15 months if so many people in rural New Zealand did not still have access only to dial-up internet.
View the full survey here (PDF).
Also read: Break it, and they will come: broadband subscribers top 1 million