The term 'broadband' refers to high-speed, always-on Internet.
There is almost universal agreement that broadband is to the 21st century what roads and rail were to the 20th century – critical infrastructure, and a basic requirement for ongoing economic growth.
Broadband Internet connections are much faster than dial-up connections, meaning you can quickly and easily transfer large quantities of data, images, graphics, video and audio files.
For businesses, a broadband connection means faster access to information and improved communications.
The speed of a broadband connection is measured in bits per second. Despite definitional arguments about what constitutes broadband, we maintain that download speeds of 256Kbit/s (Kilobits per second) and upload speeds of 128Kbit/s fall well short of being classed broadband.
We define basic broadband services as starting from 2Mbit/s (Megabits per second) synchronous (i.e. download and upload speeds are the same).
'Real broadband' arguably starts at 10Mbit/s synchronous and above, yet for countries at the top of the OECD's broadband rankings the focus is shifting even higher - from 100Mbit/s to 1Gbit/s (Gigabits per second).
___________________________________
This website is hosted by InternetNZ (the Internet Society of New Zealand Inc).
InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) has responded to the Government’s request for comment on its Broadband Investment Initiative, supporting the approach and providing feedback on a variety of policy, consultation and timing aspects.
28 April 2009
InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) congratulates the Minister of Communications Steven Joyce and the Government for solidly following through with their pre-election commitment to a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network for New Zealand.
31 March 2009