Mr. Restricted

The people of New Zealand are friendly as and generous to a fault. You could throw a rock in any town and hit five people who would be eager to shout you a beer and swap sheep stories in Her Majesty’s Mangled English. However, there is one thing that the Kiwis are tight with - the internet. After living in the land of milk and honey, where bandwidth flows like advertisements from Time Warner, the stark New Zealand broadband leaves me ashamedly naked.

I stayed for a while at the Auckland City Hotel in the heart of Auckland’s central business district. The SkyCity needle pierced the sky overhead bristling with communications relays. In fact, my netbook was weighed down with the burden wireless networks available, all of them locked away as the fire from Prometheus. The gracious guardians of fire at the concierge desk said that there was a half hour of broadband available free as a guest.

Happily clacking away, I attacked web of possible attractions. The website of The Edge quickly surrendered the floorplan of symphony seating and the Auckland zoo’s flash website rotated the primal faces of orangutans and giraffes to stare back at me. Not more than five minutes on the blissfulnet and the connection was severed; I had exceeded the allotted ten megabytes. How, O how, could they consider ten megabytes to be broadband? It’s like broadband telegraph messages. Buckle up - it’s going to be a wild ride of text!