Published in News

Middle Earth has bad Broadband

by on20 February 2012



Master Laketown can't connect his iPhone


Unpaid spokesman for Apple Steven Fry has slammed New Zealand for having a pants broadband.

New Zealand is once again becoming the set of a Middle Earth inspired flick and Fry is going to be staring as the Mayor of Laketown.  This town is destroyed by a dragon which looks and talks suspiciously like Sherlock Holmes.
Fry showed up in New Zealand and immediately discovered that his glorious Apple smartphone failed to work. 

With typical British person visiting the colonies attitude he promptly tweeted that New Zealand's broadband is "probably the worst broadband I've ever encountered (sic)." He dubbed the service as "pathetic" and called on Kiwis to rise up and demand better. [British colonies rising up and demanding something better? Sounds vaguely familiar. Ed]

Thinking he was experiencing technical problems, Telecom NZ replied to the tweet, offering Fry a mobile broadband connection. Fry said he knew “kiwi land was remote”, but if Avatar can be made here and NZ wants to keep its reputation for being the loveable, easy-going, outdoorsy yet tech savvy place it is, then pressure @telecomNZ into offering better packages. Fry said that Kiwis travel. A lot. They know 20MB is routine in Europe without throttling and the UK rolling out ultra fast fibreoptic.

“New Zealand might be world champions at rugby & filmmaking. Pressure the providers to stop it being a digital embarrassment," he said.

However New Zealand's broadband is not that bad, particularly compared with parts of the UK and NZ Telecom did a bit of an investigation. Then sadly it turned out that Fry had shot his mouth off before checking why his Broadband was so pants. The house he was staying at while he was filming had only paid for a limited broadband connection. Obviously the owners did not need megabytes of broadband when they were not hosting the Mayor of Laketown.  So Fry had shown up and downloaded their entire limit and promptly been throttled.

While he announced his mistake on Twitter, Fry went on to call service capping “disastrous”. But NZ Telecom said that customers are only capped if they choose to be. “Bill shock is a problem,” a Telecom spokesperson pointed out.  “If you have teenage children in particular data usage can be heavy, and you want to make sure how much data you can use.”

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