Backbencher

Not many people realize this but the internet connections we have in the United States are some of the slowest in the world, mainly because most Americans are happy with the speed of their connection. I found an article in the New Zealand Herald that says a town called Whangarei will be getting New Zealand's fastest broadband speeds yet with the installation of new fiber optic cable. Other cities in New Zealand are still making use of coaxial copper lines (cable). Speeds up to 1Gbps (Gigabits (billion) per second) are said to be availalable which is insanely fast. My CableOne connection is 3Mbps (Megabits (million) per second). That's almost 1000 TIMES faster! I am so jealous. Change your opinions America! We need faster internet access!

I wouldn't be surprised if Australia's access was just as fast but seriously we are getting into some serious speeds and this is just going to help industries such as BitTorrent, IPTV, and console gaming.

In a somewhat related article, those New Zealanders can now download content from New Zealand's Sky TV network. From what I gathered from the article they will have a lot of movies and tv shows that have been shown on the network. They all use Windows DRM (Digital Rights Management) so they won't work on Mac computers or any other device unless it runs Windows. Very not cool.

It's really exciting seeing this area of the world embracing technology and in some ways even better so than we are.