Speaking at last week’s Huawei Ultra-Fast Broadband Summit Dr. Murray Milner, Principle Consultant, Milner Consulting, and former Telecom CTO, said that data caps are likely to remain in New Zealand for some time.

Addressing the importance of the Ultra-Fast Broadband initiative, Milner said, “Data caps are likely to remain in New Zealand while we remain isolated from the rest of the world. It’s pretty hard to move us so that’s probably going to remain the case for some time to come. We have a very small population base to pay for any expensive cable capacity.”

Milner went on to emphasise what’s already on the minds of many internet users.

“The data cap issue is a major one and it must change, especially as we work with rich media content. If we have a data cap today of 10GBs per month and a UFB service operating at 100mbs per second PIR, and assuming we can get that PIR, then we can transfer about 12.5 megabytes per second.”

This would burn up a data cap of 10GBs in the retail market in about 15 minutes.

“Not very satisfying for the end users,” Milner added. “Alternatively a high definition movie, which is encoded to occupy about 10GBs, means that we can download one movie per month under the current caps. Again, not a very satisfying opportunity for customers. We’ve got to change that.”