Could satellite-borne internet be the answer to our broadband slump? After all, there's no expensive fibre optic cable to lay, and no need to be within range of a wi-fi, WiMax or 3G transmitter.

No, say the gnomes at Wired. According to an issue from two years back (and you're going to be getting a few artifacts week as I clear out my office ahead of our move to 80 Greys Ave), a satellite has to fly 23,000km above the earth to achieve a geosynchronous orbit (that is, for the satellite to orbit at the same speed as the planet spins, effectively keeping the satellite, and its TV or GPS or broadband transmission, beaming over a fixed point.)

Now packets of broadband data can, of course, when not inhibited by glugged up exchanges or claggy servers, move at the speed of light. But the minimum signal delay for a signal sent via a geosynchronous satellite is 0.24 seconds. That's lightspeed up to 23,000km, then back down again.

And in an online gaming environment, a lot could happen in a quarter of a second.

You could die before you even know someone's shooting at you.

Anyhow, it now looks like land-lubbing fibre-optic cable will remain New Zealand's main broadband link to the outside world for some time.

Southern Cross Cables Ltd, part-owned by Telecom (but registered in Bermuda!), has just announced an upgrade of the Southern Cross Cable that links NZ and the US (see a map of it here). It won't take place until later this year, but it will boost throughput from 240 gigabits a second to a head-spinning 1.2 terabits per second.

Sadly, any internet connection is only as strong as its weakest link, so that whooshing data will have slowed to a trickle by the time it seeps through your local phone exchange. But it's nice to see big pipes being built somewhere. On a seabed. Deep under the Pacific Ocean.