NZ Broadband sufficient for videoconferencing already!

Michael Sampson's experience with video-conferencing to the East coast of the USA from NZ.

I'm not going to say it couldn't be better, but I think this kills the "can't do business properly with the current ADSL infrastructure in NZ" argument.

I'm still not sure what Rod wants, but I say:
1. If you want to host some content that is of global focus then don't host it in NZ. You're writing a blank cheque for your bandwidth otherwise, and giving a higher-latency experience to the rest of the world. By all means choose a decent NZ hosting company but they'll host it in other countries for you. I chose these guys.
2. If you want to host something for NZers then still consider hosting it somewhere else. See point 1. Ask yourself what you gain by hosting locally; the latency differences are not going to be noticable for the average Kiwi surfer.
3. If you want to build a business that requires vast amounts of data transfer, go into a major city centre. Don't complain you can't run it from your house in NZ; even in Sweden, Korea, or FTTH territory you would have business continuity concerns doing this.
4. Yes I know not everyone has ADSL. Not everyone has reticulated water or sewerage either. I've compared Internet access to reticulated gas before and I think the analogy still holds; if your business wants it then it can get it put in for a price. Don't expect everyone else to subsidise your business though. If you can't get gas/internet where you are then perhaps the business you want to build needs to relocate -- this is something every business faces.

I do want cheaper bandwidth rates for international traffic, but I also accept that we're quite a long way away from anywhere. Bytes are still cheaper that physical bits (pun intended) to transport, so we're still minimising that aspect of our geo-disadvantage by moving online.