Are we starting to see Broadband Fatigue in New Zealand?

I wrote about Telecom finally returning full-rate DSL to customers after all kinds of silly wrangling to avoid doing so. You'd think that after all the bitching and moaning about the poorly performing broadband here, the news that Telecom will take the handbrake off DSL by October 25 would be reasonably big news.

Not so: there's not one word about it in the Herald, Stuff/Dompost or NBR.

It's the first step towards removing all the artificial constraints that make NZ DSL so sub-standard, and it will benefit businesses for instance wanting to use Voice over IP and remote access - interleave can now be switched off to reduce latency and the higher upstream speeds will make the service far more usable than before.

Was it just too "geeky" and difficult to cover this? Maybe, but it's more likely that media are bored with the whole broadband debate - just like most other people are. Since DSL came out seven years ago, it's been marred by endless negatives: bill shocks, poor reliability, high pricing, sluggish performance and of course, the farcically convoluted Yes, Minister style regulation that Telecommunications Commissioner Douglas Webb concocted.

The public is expecting more of the same, and the perception of DSL is that it's a complete dog that's only worth buying if there's nothing else available. Telecom maneouvred DSL into this position instead of developing the service (we should all have had ADSL2+ last year already).

Full-rate DSL sounds great but thanks to Telecom's chronic underinvestment, its backhaul network isn't up to delivering the high speeds people quite rightly expect from their newly unshackled broadband connections. Telecom hasn't upgraded its Alcatel ASAMs which have only a single 155Mbps ATM circuit, and which are already showing signs of straining under the load of rate-limited customers. More full-rate customers and well, it's just not going to be the fast broadband you think it will, and there you go, another negative DSL story.