Kim Dotcom offers free internet with own submarine cable Kim Dotcom has told the world he wants to get into the submarine cable business. Dotcom’s plan is to revive a company called Pacific Fibre that, as we reported last August, wanted to build a USA-to-New Zealand cable, but sank for lack of funds. New Zealand has few submarine cables connections to the world, which keeps the …
I thought that after territorial waters were extended from 3 to 12 (nautical?) miles Sealand was no longer in international waters? I know there original basis for sovereignty was based on a court decision and a visit from an envoy but this was pre expansion. Personally I don't care one way or the other, but methinks that whilst Sealand wasn't up to much it was ignored and allowed to continue. If Kim were to buy it, move in, and start getting up to mischief (or at least upsetting people with money) there would be more motivation to test the legal standing of the 'principality'.
Extradition would be tricky, since they have royally f*cked up the initial arrest (illegal arrest, illegal search and seizure, illegal transfer of his property to the FBI, and on and on...). Also a few wee errors on the part of the local internal spooks have surfaced, in terms of illegally spying on him. (Can't spy on legal residents without some "national security" nonsense, that they didn't have -- spooks claim to have been unaware of Dotcom's residency status so thought spying on German bloke was OK; well, how could the security establishment have feasibly managed to check such publicly available information? Make a phone call to the Department of Internal Affairs? F*ck those gummint' bureaucrats!)
Depending on how much Dotcom's business ends up being assessed as worth, he may be able to simply buy his own submarine cable outright once the NZ taxpayer reimburses him for our government's addiction to Uncle Sam's dong...
Come to think of it, he should just buy a political party then buy himself into government.
I for one welcome our potential hefty German submarine cable-owning overlord... etc.
Lots of countries talk about it, to this date I don't think any have actually done anything about it. Hopefully NZ does get it, because then other countries might need to pull their fingers out and do something similar. Who cares if the free broadband is only 256Mb if it's free.
Although what are the bets he's doing this because it'll make his datacenter for the new MEGA company cheaper to run.
The cable might be free once its laid but its unlikely that providers in the the US will give him free rack space, power and peering and transit.
Arab investors may fund it for a time (as for the moment they have little else to spend their caverns of cash on) but they certainly aren't stupid and are unlikely to fund it forever if it doesn't make a return.
Here in the UK plenty have tried to make free Internet (or free after an initial fee) work as a business model, all were shortlived after telcos withdraw support after usage outstripped estimates by an order of magnitude.
Anyone remember RedHotAnt or LibertySurf?
money talks in most the world. a lot of people want to support him. there is little to no trust in the us everywhere. KDC bought his way in to NZ with an agreement to invest, and if he has the content that people want at me.ga and builds the cable, and keeps the data in NZ, he will be in a pretty strong position.
The NZ courts seem to be offering him a lot more than the american ones. Building the cable will be massively expensive, but if he can do it, then the second time around I reckon NZ would be likely to protect him like they should have in the first place (I dont think they saw this coming). Also, Australia is real close by, and has a lot of fibre, so even if he cant cross the planet a nice fall back plan would be an NZ to Sydney pipe (2153kms or 1338 miles), at which point he could peer with southern cross networks...
I may have missed one major detail.. half of the southern cross cable network allready runs straight through new zealand. So its not true that NZ has limited connectivity, and not true that KDC would need to build a leg back to sydney. In this case, its just another regular business venture, and if he did it I reckon he'd be crazy not to expand and try to carry a lot of australias bandwidth too.
http://www.southerncrosscables.com/home/network/overviewandmap
It's fairly cheap to land bandwidth into New Zealand.
Otoh it's bloody expensive (5-14 times the landed cost) to get it shipped anywhere else in the country.
There's (still) a nice cosy duopoly at work in NZ and they're not above paying backhanders to ministers to keep things that way (even if they've been "forced" to unbundle local loop - accepting that doesn't mean they lost control of backbone paths, etc)
"Broadband 250GB $61.00NZ == 31 UKP"
This is simply not true. For $75NZ you get 30GB, for $85 ~60GB and in the last few months one ISP started offering "unlimited" for $100. Those data caps were half as much a year ago for the same price. I'm also betting you have far better broadband coverage than NZ.
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