Kim has friends at the tier 1 level, that should be clear from the Mega days. Those same commodity bandwidth friends would likely be willing to expand into an industry breaking market like NZ. Those players would likely be willing and capable of terminating a cable AND providing transit.
I've always wondered why big tech companies haven't used New Zealand as an experimental place for their "plans".
What I mean by that is, we have 4 million people, and we're not a large place by any means (2,000km in total length, something like that).
If Google wanted to show the world their "vision", they could simply come to NZ, buy a mobile carrier (for millions, not billions of dollars) and give everyone free plans (or whatever their vision is) and lay down fibre to everyone in the country (much faster than the stupid government imo) . They'd even be able to get their awesome self-driving cars on the roads fairly easily, without having to spend so much damn money lobbying.
As per the NZ public, we love new stuff. Right now, we're ripped off in every aspect (consumer-wise). Some massve corporation would change this country in a heartbeat, and for the better. (I'd hope anyway).
New Zealand, in my opinion, has an awesome "sample" size (regarding population). We were one of the first countries in the world to go from cash to using EFTPOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFTPOS) extremely fast.
>> "EFTPOS is highly popular in New Zealand, and being used for about 60% of all retail transactions.[23] In 2009, there were 200 EFTPOS transactions per person"
To me, it makes so much sense for massive corporations to come to NZ, trial their stuff _easily_, and for half the cost (made up number) than it would be to do it in the US.
Once people see how awesome NZ is when it comes to all these self-driving cars, cheap/free internet, cheap phones, and cheap/free phone data/calls/sms surely the rest of the world would want to be just like us? :]
I definitely agree with you, I'd love to see more tech companies entering the NZ market. Sadly we are lagging behind other countries when it comes to technology.
One of my own goals is to help introduce a better environment for technology in NZ. Hopefully encouraging more people to start their own startup and base their operations in NZ ( I'm planning on basing my startup here in NZ ).
I assume you mean using NZ as an experimental place with a view to then justifying expansion into the US on a larger scale, since you brought up Google specifically. As opposed to the EU or something.
I don't think that would work. Look at health care. There are multitude of good systems and mediocre systems, all around the developed world (and the developing, for that matter). There are plenty of example of what to do, what not to do, etc. And yet, you don't have to look too far to find people who are totally convinced that nationalized health care is a mistake, that it can't work, that it will bankrupt society, which all flies in the face not just of basic policy research and mathematics, but fucking real world examples.
And that is because American society does not give a shit what the rest of the world thinks or does, and they do not believe that the same rules apply to them, or that the experience of, say, the UK or Japan could ever apply to them. Certainly not NZ. You could have self-driving flying cars and ubiquitous networking in NZ and still Americans could give you infinite reasons why it will never work and is too expensive and also probably communism.
Now, for going NZ -> literally anywhere else, you have a good idea.
