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For reasons that would take too long to explain here, I moved to New Zealand about six months ago. I brought my life with me, including, among goods and chattels more varied than I had realized, my trusty Mac mini, which has been doing sterling duty as a Web and mail server for a year or more. My life also includes a wife and daughter, and they, not surprisingly, came with me too.
This has been an almost entirely unqualified success. The people in New Zealand are friendly, the food is astonishing, and the wine is spectacular. But, even in God's Own Country, not everything is perfect. New Zealand is a truly splendid place to live in many, indeed almost all, regards. But for a techie - and I am, quite unashamedly and unabashedly, one of that number - there are definite quibbles, of which by far the largest is bandwidth, or the lack thereof.
When I lived in America, I was undeniably spoiled, as many Americans tend to be. Life, however shallow it may have been in other regards when one lives in Florida, was certainly easy from a connectivity point of view. My home office had a broadband connection with - as I simply took for granted, took for my birthright - unlimited data. I could slurp down, and throw up, all the data I wanted. The Internet was mine, all of the time.
But when we signed up for our New Zealand connection, we were stunned - stunned, I say! - to discover that the Internet, in New Zealand, is a highly limited and finite resource. We went from "all you can download" to "you get 20 GB a month, you'll pay $100 a month, and you'll be grateful for it" in the time it takes to fly from Los Angeles to Auckland (which is, now that I come to think about it, a horrendously long time). This was a most atrocious imposition for the Internet junkies that my wife and daughter had become (not me, though, of course - I was far too virtuous, too self-restrained). For all that New Zealand had to offer, the narrowness of its Internet pipes was simply intolerable.
We opted for the "double your data" option (and the additional $30 per month that wasn't optional), but we still find ourselves limited by 40 GB per month. I check the online usage meter every few days (using, in the process, a few more precious bytes; oh, the cruel, vicious, bitter irony!) and issue imprecations to Wife and Daughter, reminding them that Facebook is a luxury, not an absolute necessity; they, as addicts always do, try to justify their endless status-checking as being entirely reasonable, indeed essential. I calculate the bandwidth usage of Skype and of YouTube; I flinch when I see Daughter download another Mary-Kate and Ashley movie from iTunes (that's not really a bandwidth issue; that's just on general principles - I'd
cringe if that were happening if we had a free and entirely unlimited T3 connection direct to the trans-Pacific backbone). I have developed new and careful Internet habits: I use the "Open link in new window" option if I think there's any possibility that I might want to visit a second link from the same page, to avoid potentially having to load the original page a second time, and Apple Mail no longer checks automatically every minute - each check uses several dozens of bytes, I'm sure, and they all add up. I even avoid visiting Japanese and Chinese sites, conscious of two-byte character sets using more than their fair share of bandwidth.
I check my Google Analytics numbers with conflicted emotions: every page view for our various blogs and online presences is, on the one hand, a cause for celebration - more visits, more revenue, more Internet fame and glory. On the other hand, those page views are also an occasion for more hand-wringing, since they were served up from my Mac mini, over my desperately and mercilessly limited Internet connection. I post photographs of the beautiful country we now call home, but wince when I see that I've had visits to my site. Even the very act of visiting the Google Analytics Web site eats up a handful of kilobytes that I can scarce afford. And even writing this article has been a painful experience; while the catharsis of venting about
the primitivity of our connection is undeniably therapeutic, every adjective, every atom of invective, every single character I devote to letting the world know how abjectly deprived we are is one fewer byte that can be used elsewhere.
The reason for this caution is simple. As soon as we reach our allocated 40 GB - think about that for a second; it's only a gig and a third per day, and the lovely and talented Mrs. McCabe, with whom I share everything, including my bandwidth, is a Web designer - a Gollum-like finger, somewhere in a dungeon buried deep in darkest Auckland, reaches out in the gloom, flicks a switch, and says, "It's dial-up for you. Your bandwidth is mine, it's mine, my precioussss." And that's it. We're reduced to an Amish connection, one so slow it would be more efficient to hand-write packets of data and strap them to the legs of carrier pigeons. Web pages load - if they load - in minutes, rather than seconds. YouTube is a pipe dream. Downloads...
well, downloads don't. There has been much discussion around the blogosphere in the last month about when the first decade of the 21st century will end. Here in New Zealand that discussion is academic - we're still, at least in terms of Internettery, stuck back in the 1990s. My connection today is so slow that I half-expect to hear the dolphin-screech of a modem actually dialing in to Vodafone as I try to connect, and I'm grateful that I'm not on deadline for this article. Looking at the cave paintings of Lascaux would represent a faster data transfer than the one I'm hobbled with right now.
I have, I would like to stress, been more than diligent in my attempts to figure out where our precious data might be going. My first thought was Skype, given that Daughter spends much of her time video-chatting with friends back in the Northern Hemisphere. I installed iStat Menus; as far as I could tell, a two-way video conference was using only around 120 KBps. But Vodafone's (for they are our current Internet provider) online "check your usage" tool was reporting that there were days when we used as much as 6.5 GB of data. The day we reached this number (our record so far, by the way) was a school day - I doubt, then, that Daughter's Skyping can be the culprit (she would have
needed 15 hours of non-stop chatting, and while she's good, even she's not that good).
I suspected that it might be my server. I was reluctant to give up running my own server after moving to New Zealand because I've localized a handful of my domains - mccabe.net.nz, threelions.co.nz, astralgraphics.co.nz - and it's hard to find U.S.-based hosting services that handle .nz domains. I host my personal site, stevemccabe.net, as well as my clients' sites, through a European hosting-and-reselling service, but they don't offer anything in the Kiwi domain space, so I've bought my domains through GoDaddy. I've become familiar with GoDaddy's DNS setup system, and so, frankly, it's just convenient to register with them and then host myself. That said, GoDaddy's pricing structure for hosting is Byzantine beyond belief (I've had
clients in the past want me to set up their sites on GoDaddy - oh, the power of advertising, especially if it involves scantily clad ladies with large chests - and I now make it a condition of service that I provide hosting as well as design) and life was so much easier when I knew that I had all the Internet connectivity I wanted.
So I looked at the traffic stats on my server. This was a bittersweet experience because on the one hand, no, I wasn't ploughing through my data, which was good, but on the other hand, this meant that my sites weren't getting the traffic I would have liked. Still, at least that was another possible culprit struck from the list.
I issued the sternest of imprecations to my girls, and, to all intents and purposes, stopped using the InterWebs. But no matter how much we cranked back our usage, we still found that we were using - or, at the very least, we were being reported as using - at least several hundred megabytes a day.
It was time to talk to Vodafone. I contacted them several times, and received several different bogus explanations: I had viruses (ahem, my network is Apple-only), I had moochers (WPA2 password, a house built of brick, a large garden) - basically, they claimed it was my fault, one way or another. It certainly couldn't be Vodafone's fault. I pushed a little further. I was told to install a data tracker - I was even sent Vodafone's recommended monitor, SurplusMeter. I installed it across my network, and it reported that I was using monstrous amounts of data. The reason was simple - it meters not only wide-area, but also local-area network traffic. My iMac, for example, was
pushing through megabyte after megabyte, even though I had no applications open at all. Well, none that would use the Internet.
Except iTunes. But I wasn't downloading anything. What I was doing was streaming music to my AirPort Express. SurplusMeter was recording every last packet that went out of the data port it was charged with monitoring - in this case, my AirPort card. I called Vodafone again, and explained that the numbers SurplusMeter was reporting were meaningless. They said I should shut down my local network for a day and see what my numbers were like. I did - and on that day my wife's iMac managed not to report a single bit going in or out. Not bad for a Web designer who telecommutes between New Zealand and Florida.
Vodafone's next suggestion was that we had a line fault. This is a real possibility - I live in a very old house (we think it's pre-war, but we're not sure which war; my money's on the Boer War) - and one of the call-centre people I spoke to noticed that, while a DSL modem typically reconnects four or five times a day, mine had already reconnected over a dozen times - and I still hadn't finished my first cup of coffee. They assured me that they would look into this, but in the meantime I'd need to disconnect my phone line (a service, mind you, that I pay for) for a day in case there was a problem with my DSL filters. This may, or may not, have been the problem; I have no way of knowing. Maybe they're still running tests. At the very
least, they haven't replied.
Finally, I wrote to Russell Stanners, CEO of Vodafone NZ, at the end of last month. A week or so later, I got a phone call from Vodafone, and, after a long chat, the rep who called me (also called Russell; hmmm...) agreed to waive the $199 early termination fee and release me from the one-year contract that we would have been bound to until June 2010.
We're switching to TelstraClear. I'm not doing this because they're particularly brilliant, but because they do one thing that Vodafone doesn't - instead of dialing us back to pecking-out-bits-on-a-Morse-code-tapper speeds, they'll keep on selling us more gigabytes. I'm willing to pay for a service (especially a service that I actually receive), but the idea that I only get my 40 gigabytes, and, regardless of whose fault it is, that's it, I'm cut off like a naughty schoolboy, well, that really chafes.
So now we're waiting. Our Internet connection went back to last-millennium speeds after only a fortnight this month, so we're struggling - some evenings we can't tell whether we're offline, or just really slow. And although I signed up to TelstraClear over a week ago, I just had a phone call from one of their reps letting me know that, because of the Christmas and midsummer holiday backlog, they won't flip our switch for another week.
I'll be emailing this article off to TidBITS World Headquarters shortly. I have no idea when they may get it. The Word document that contains this piece is 41 KB, which, at my current Internet speeds, could take until March to send. It might be quicker for me to save it to a CD, swim to California with the disc between my teeth, walk across the country, and hand it to Adam personally.
[Bio: Steve McCabe is a Mac consultant, tech writer, and teacher who moved, for reasons that have but the most tangential connection to this article, to New Zealand in April 2009. He writes about his adventures in New Zealand, he blogs about technology, and he is currently rebuilding his personal Web site.]
