"Dotcom says that the company will consume 2 terabits of daily bandwidth, which in perspective is more bandwidth in a day than the entire country uses right now."
I'm fairly certain that a country with more than 2.6 million people on the internet [1] will use more than 256 GiB in a day... Even if just 256,000 of those people (~10%) downloaded a single megabyte in a day, you're already at the 2 terabit figure - and something tells me that much more than 10% of the internet connected population in NZ will download more than a single megabyte in a day.
Come to think of it, I probably downloaded around a megabyte worth of stuff just opening the article to begin with.
I thought that initially, but they mention in the article "2 terabits of daily bandwidth", which I assumed to be a metric of per unit-time. Furthermore, I found a graph detailing internet usage per user per month for various countries [1].
If we take New Zealand to be equivalent to the North American average (higher than the European average) of 14.5 GiB/user-month, and apply that to the 2.6 million internet connected people in New Zealand, this equates to an average bandwidth of 14.5 GiB/sec, or around 116 gigabits per second.
The only way you can get close to 2 terabits per second is to assume all of those 2.6 million people use 256 gigabytes of bandwidth per month - and certainly, I don't think that the people in NZ use ten to twenty times as much bandwidth as the other countries in the world [1]. (Other assumptions: 30 days in a month, and all of the 66% internet connected population in NZ uses 14.5 GiB per month)
I'm willing to bet NZers use less than the average. Data caps are very low (30-40gigs is standard, all you can eat is uncommon) and speeds firmly abysmal (3-4mb here off peak, I'm in the biggest city, Auckland, and am about 10-15 from the centre).
Keep in mind that all internet in NZ and Australia is metered. Similar to mobile data here, except more like pay-as-you-go. You pay for a block of bandwidth and then use it till it's gone. Not the same idea as here in the States.
Just FYI, this is not strictly true. Most internet plans are metered, however you can often find a plan that includes unlimited downloads (and that does not shape bandwidth).
For example, see [1].
It is still typical for plans to be graded by the download cap, and for a time there seemed to be no unlimited download plans available, however this situation is being disrupted by ISPs like TPG. They are almost certainly overselling their bandwidth, but my personal experience is quite good with consistent fast downloads even when downloading terrabytes of data in a month (I lived in a student share house).
But with this Pacific Fibre cable the populace would probably see much cheaper bandwidth, especially if the NZ government is trying to get 50%+ of the population 100mbps.
I have spoken with people high up in the Ultra fast broadband rollout, and they have no idea. I work for a radiology company, and we would like to be able to have 1 gig files belonging to 20ish patients shuffled across town in a reasonable time frame. The UFB guy just didn't get it - orthopedic surgeons see patients for 15mins tops, and spending that waiting for imaging to arrive is somewhat useless. The guy was telling me how well YouTube works on his home UFB. Great.
Edit: To be clear, the people I talked to had no idea, presumably the company as a whole does as the scale of the work they are doing is pretty huge, and there haven't been big issues as far as I am aware.
They've obviously got their units messed up in that section. I used 99GiB yesterday, and I'm fairly sure I don't account for over a third of my country's bandwidth usage :)
I'm fairly certain that a country with more than 2.6 million people on the internet [1] will use more than 256 GiB in a day... Even if just 256,000 of those people (~10%) downloaded a single megabyte in a day, you're already at the 2 terabit figure - and something tells me that much more than 10% of the internet connected population in NZ will download more than a single megabyte in a day.
Come to think of it, I probably downloaded around a megabyte worth of stuff just opening the article to begin with.
[1] Ministry of Social Development, New Zealand, "Telephone and internet access in the home." http://socialreport.msd.govt.nz/social-connectedness/telepho...