And to think us plebian Australians were starting to get relatively happy with the idea of having functional NBN 100 non-fibre connections.
The deal is part of the Hyperfibre offering from Chorus in — where else — New Zealand, and it’s offensively cheap. Mind you, given how our Kiwi cousins often have to pay ludicrously bullshit markups on technology, this kind of deal is only fair.
The better-than-gigabit offering was first announced around this time last year, with Chorus offering 2000/4000 plans to begin with. Chorus says their fibre network covers about 80 per cent of the country, although here’s a better picture of what areas are covered by the Hyperfibre 2000/4000 offerings.
Blimey.
But you know what’s extra brutal? Just how affordable the ridiculous Hyperfibre product actually is. And the Chorus equivalent of NBN 1000 — which they guarantee up to 900/400 — is stupidly cheap too. The Fibre and Fibre Pro offerings are going for $NZ60 to $NZ149 ($56-139) a month, while the 4000/4000 plan is available for $NZ149-199 ($139 to $185) a month.
Goddamnit New Zealand.
According to their projections, the regular “Hyperfibre” connection would download a 15GB game update in just over half a minute.
By those figures, a regular update for Call of Duty — the ones so big they bogged down Australia’s internet to the point where even NBN Co was shitty about it — would take just over a minute. If you could download the game at full bandwidth, anyway, and that’s provided the developer’s link to Australia hasn’t capped out by that stage.
The best Australia can do by comparison is NBN 1000. There’s only a handful of main offerings nationwide, with Superloop the cheapest at $129/month for a 3000GB cap. Kogan are doing an unlimited deal for $134.90, with a typical evening speed of around 250 MBps.
If that’s not enough, Aussie Broadband have their unlimited plan at $149/month with guaranteed Ultrafast speeds. NBN Co rates Ultrafast as “peak wholesale download speeds of 500 to close to 1000 Mbps”, which should get you all the patches you need quickly enough. The upload speeds cap out at 50Mbps, however, so the overall deal is nowhere near as good as what Chorus are doing. But that’s the difference between Australia and New Zealand, after all.
Your ability to get NBN 250 or higher will depend on the NBN rolled out to where you live. That said, gigabit — or internet beyond NBN 100 — is slowly being rolled out across the country. Around three-quarters of Australian homes should be able to get gigabit NBN by 2023 under a new upgrade program, and the first gigabit services should be available for NBN fibre to the curb (FTTC) users by the end of this year. A small handful of suburbs have been nominated to get upgraded from the garbage-tier FTTN to proper fibre internet — go check the list on Gizmodo to see if you’re eligible.
As for those lucky buggers in New Zealand, I’d love it if you could run a test for me. Having been banned all those years ago, could you fire up Star Citizen‘s Hyperspace option and see how long it takes? You know, for science.
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