Guest Post: Being always-connected

By Lance Wiggs, August 21, 2011 (no comments yet)

Xero‘s Craig Walker reports from the USA on the internet gap between there and Australia and New Zealand. Xero founder and CEO Rod Drury is a founder and director of Pacific Fibre.

As part of Xero’s push into the US market my wife and I have made the move from Wellington to San Francisco to help start the US office. San Francisco is a great city – the home of Silicon Valley, one flight from NZ, a good timezone match for back home – so it made sense for San Francisco to be the initial base of US operations for Xero.

Being an always-connected personality the first thing I did was to get an Internet connection into our apartment. I chose WebPass because they offer extremely high speed connections (100Mbps synchronous) to certain buildings in the City and our building happened to be on the list (similar to CityLink back in Wellington). (I actually used Yelp to help me choose – services like Yelp that back in NZ don’t have the critical mass are absolutely essential when you’re in the US).

WebPass is $45 a month with no contract (or $400 for a year) – it’s cheaper than power!

I was connected in minutes and then the first thing I asked the technician was about “data caps”. It wasn’t the New Zealand accent that threw him – it was the term. “No data cap – unlimited – have fun!” he said. The first thing you notice with very fast, unlimited Internet access is how much freedom you have. No worrying about a massive over-charging on my bill – I’ve paid for the year so I have no bills!

From a consumer perspective this opens up a wide range of options. Obviously online gaming has no limits – but it’s television where the most disruptive changes are. Back in NZ I was investing cable providers. But with unlimited, fast Internet I bought an HDTV from Amazon with built-in WiFi and preloaded with apps. Yes – a TV with apps such as Hulu, Netflix and MLB.TV (I’m a big New York Yankees baseball fan). These apps stream high definition television over WiFi. I haven’t even bothered with cable yet – I’ve got everything available right there!

Obviously it helps that the content is so readily available – but I think half the reason it’s available is because it’s accessible. Making it available in New Zealand right now would be irresponsible as the cost to consumers is so prohibitive.

Now I can’t just watch TV all day – I am supposed to be working. And working is where I’ve found the biggest benefit. At home and at work the Internet is fast. Very fast. So my productivity has immediately increased. Everything I do for Xero requires access to the Internet in some form and now it’s almost instant – in fact I would argue it is instant. The productivity gains as a technology worker are massive. Free WiFi is in abundance in the US – both in coffee shops and hotels. This is also fast and unmetered – remote working is a lifestyle choice here and a choice that’s readily available.

My wife has also noticed the difference – as Xero’s Community Manager she is online as close to 24/7 as she can get. All her devices are now connected and connected constantly. Her job is easier and she’s more productive because the infrastructure is built for her kind of job – online and real-time. And at home she’s even more ecstatic! When she wants to upload photos of our new home town to Flickr it’s an instant process – in NZ uploading 50 photos would have taken minutes – long enough for her to have to go away and do something else – now it takes seconds.

Unfortunately the Internet back home still gets in the way. As a remote worker I have a team back home that I am in constant contact with. I can make Skype calls to US phones and the clarity is perfect – Facetime is awesome. But calling back to New Zealand still lags. I know it’s not me!

I always saw the need for the Pacific Fibre project because I understood the impact of fast, ubiquitous and cheap Internet in New Zealand. But it’s so radically different in the US right now Pacific Fibre is an imperative just to compete on a level playing field. How can technology firms in New Zealand expect to compete on a global scale when there is such a massive bandwidth divide? Pacific Fibre is not a nice-to-have – it’s a mission critical requirement for all New Zealand businesses.

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