Internet experts and users are backing comments by actor Stephen Fry, who yesterday called on Kiwis to demand better broadband service.
The Brit yesterday "stirred the hornet's nest" when he vented his frustrations on Twitter about New Zealand's slow internet.
"[New Zealand has] has probably the worst broadband I've ever encountered. Turns itself off, slows to a crawl. Pathetic," wrote Fry, who's in Wellington as a cast member in Sir Peter Jackson's film The Hobbit.
He urged Kiwis to "rebellion" and said a "smart guy" can make "a fortune and a fool of the complacent Telecomm [sic] and their contemptuous attitude to customers. Phew! Rant over."
The govt. and telecommunications professionals say the roll-out of the ultra-fast fibre broadband network will allow New Zealand to catch the remainder of the sector, if not overtake it.
The head of the Telecommunications Users Association of NZ, Paul Brislen, agreed with Fry.
"He's quite right - you would not submit with potholes for your roads, so that you should not have to place up with Third World broadband standards to boot."
NZ's broadband lagged behind other developed countries as a result of limitations of the copper cable network, Mr Brislen said.
Internet providers couldn't promise fast downloading as the connection speed varied greatly reckoning on where you were.
"When you have a glance in any respect broadband plans here, you will see the majority of them say nothing about speed - everybody gets as fast as your line can bare ... internet providers can't sell a speed-based connection because they do not know how distant you're from the copper connection point, so do not know how briskly your internet would be."
Britain also has a copper cable connection but users can get a miles faster connection via a TV signal. In addition, supermarket chain Tesco offers an infinite 250 megabytes-per-second- plan for $4.70 a month.
"In New Zealand, our data-caps are incredibly low," Mr Brislen said. "You've just got to appear around the Ditch to Australia, where they're now moving to at least one terabyte data-caps - that's one thousand gigabytes."
But New Zealand's broadband landscape could be almost unrecognisable once the ultra-fast broadband network was rolled out, Mr Brislen said.
Schools, hospitals and businesses are first in line to be attached to the fibre cables, if you want to provide speeds of 100 megabytes a second.
Crown Fibre Holdings, which takes care of the Government's $1.35 billion investment within the scheme, has already started the residential rollout of the cables in Whangarei, Hamilton, Tauranga and Wanganui.
Labour's IT spokeswoman, Clare Curran, congratulated Fry for "putting the cat one of many pigeons" even as New Zealand's leading stakeholders were meeting on the Future Broadband conference in Auckland.
The vast majority of nzherald.co.nz readers agreed with Fry, however many defended internet service in New Zealand, saying the service was faster and more reliable than other countries they have got visited.
Yesterday's debate started when Fry wasn't in a position to get "greater than a crawl out of the system" as he tried to upload a video.
He had exceeded the limit for broadband data on the private home where he was staying. Accordingly, speeds slowed to dial-up pace.
Telecom spokeswoman Katherine Murphy said the actor was given a brand new plan so he could send and upload as much video and audio as he wanted and be charged extra if he went over the limit again.
But that didn't calm Fry's resolve to get New Zealanders demanding more from internet providers.
"Yes, kiwi land is remote, but when Avatar may be made here and [NZ] desires to keep its rep for being the loveable, easy-going, outdoorsy yet tech savvy place it can be, then pressure @telecomNZ into offering better packages...
"Come on New Zealand. You're world champions at rugby & filmmaking. Pressure the providers to forestall [NZ] being a digital embarrassment," he told his four million Twitter followers.
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