Geography is destiny: Truenet rates NZ broadband speed by region

A study by Truenet (recently appointed the Commerce Commission's second official broadband tester) has found that on the internet, as in life, geography is destiny.

The closer your physical proximity to the Southern Cross Cable's landing point in Auckland, the faster your broadband is likely to be.

(The 50% Telecom-owned, Bermuda-incorporated Southern Cross Cable is NZ's only fibre optic link to the outside world, lands in the north Auckland suburb of Albany. It feeds internet exchanges in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Auckland is also home to of the most local domain name server or DNS - infrastructure. A DNS lookup is one of the most time-consuming elements of acccessing a web page).

There were a couple of anomalies: Northland, where the UFB rollout is most advanced, was slower than expected, and Bay of Plenty faster. 

Truenet principal John Butt said local capacity constraints could be a factor in Northland.There may be less contention (peak time clogged connections) in the Bay of Plenty than Auckland.

ABOVE: Website download times. A lower score is better. Click to enlarge. (The number to the right of each location is the number of volunteers Truenet has in a region. Truenet is looking for 400 more testers. If you want to do your bit for Commerce Commission and country, volunteer here. Butt says 80 more people are needed to fill out the full panel of 400, mostly people in the regions.) 

Truenet was recently appointed the Commerce Commission's second official broadband tester, joining UK-owned Epitiro.

Its study released this week is similar to one released in July 2011 by the Commission, in which Epitiro found a similar geographic spread:

Click to enlarge.

Why is internet life (mostly) slower south of the Bombay Hills?

Butt explains: "The speed of webpage viewing is dependent on the time taken for many small files on a webpage to download.

"The speed at which these small files download is in turn dependent on latency [lag], which is limited by the speed of light.

"This is why location of the ISP file storage could be a major factor for webpage viewing times. Some ISPs have file storage centres (caches) in two places, some in just one, but usually only in Wellington or Auckland, rarely in the South Island."

All use the Auckland internet exchange, some also use Wellington, but few peer in Christchurch, Mr Butt says.

It would help South Island speed if more peered in Christchurch.