I know I'm a bit late writing about it, but, the Broadband World Conference (Asia) 2011 went extremely well. I was very pleased to meet everyone, pleased with the way my panel discussion went and pleased with the overall results.

A lot happened while I was away - both in NZ and India. As I wrote earlier, India was generally successful, and we now have an anticipated launch date.

In NZ, Mobile Termination Rates came down (though retail rates have not yet followed), and much progress was made on the UFB network. Unfortunately, the UFB news was rather unfavourable, for two reasons.

Firstly, most of the build has gone to Telecom. So we're going to have a repeat of 1989, I can almost guarantee it - they want $38.50 at wholesale for the basic service?? Who the hell are they kidding?

But aside from that, Steven Joyce (the current Minister of Telecommunications) is basically shunning the need for a second submarine cable to land on New Zealand shores. So what'll happen is we'll have 100mbit/s within NZ, no problem - but maybe 1 or 2mbit/s to the rest of the world, if we're lucky. And we'll still have the rather harsh data caps, so we'll just be using what little allowance we have faster.

I mean, come on, faster Internet could improve New Zealand's economy significantly. Australia has 16 (yes, SIXTEEN) submarine cables, India has 9. New Zealand has just the one. WE NEED ANOTHER CABLE. I'm 100% behind the PacificFibre project, Sam Morgan, Stephen Tindall and I've personally had lengthy discussions with Mark Rushworth (the CEO of PacificFibre) about it.

In my opinion, Joyce should be replaced by someone who is actually interested in IT, because either he's being paid off by Telecom, or he doesn't quite understand what is needed to make this country a great one for Internet and Telecommunications.

I think much could be done to make NZ an outsourcing destination - Weta Studios is already doing it for Hollywood (and this Wellywood sign controversy is another thing altogether - I really hope that doesn't go through), but I think with our fairly neutral accents, we could do a lot of what the Asian countries have been doing, but better, and studies worldwide all suggest that better Internet basically corresponds to a better economy. And NZ really needs this right about now.

As such, I'm going to do what I can in order to try and help PacificFibre with funding and/or sign on Hayai as an anchor tenant, as well as build a better network next to the government's UFB project, because I really do think that it can be done more quickly and more cost effectively, and as it stands now, Kiwi's either can't or won't be willing to pay the prices that retail providers will have to charge for access to the UFB, and that's a sad state, since they're almost certainly setting up the whole project for failure.

Now that everybody knows their place with UFB, I think it will be much easier for us to get things moving, and I'm looking forward to making it all happen.

Wish me luck.