Southern Cross Cables Network – Continued Price Reductions

“With lower marginal capacity cost we have reduced our prices to the US from both New Zealand and Australia by 44%”, says Pfeffer, “the third largest decline in our history. Often coinciding with capacity upgrades, price declines are not new for Southern Cross, having averaged over 21 per cent annually since 2001.  This longstanding practice has promoted the increasing use of retail internet data with reducing cost”.  

Pfeffer said “it’s particularly pleasing to see how ISP competition has resulted in big increases to retail data caps over the last year for both Australian and New Zealand internet users, and to see the retail cost of data continuing to fall. Our new initiatives are again designed to support this process as another step towards the new NBN and UFB environments”.

Hoorah!

TLDH Files First 20 gTLD Applications

Separately, the Directors are pleased to report that Minds + Machines has today been appointed as the registry services provider for DOT KIWI LIMITED, a New Zealand company that has publically stated it will apply for the ???.kiwi??? gTLD string.  A proportion of DOT KIWI???s domain revenue and profit will be donated to a trust established to help fund the reconstruction of the earthquake devastated city of Christchurch, New Zealand.  Dot Kiwi joins other geographical, brand, and entrepreneurial clients from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America that have chosen Minds + Machines, but who wish to keep their plans confidential.

 

Peter Dengate Thrush, Chairman of TLDH

Koha community squares off against commercial fork [LWN.net]

Koha is the world’s first open source system for managing libraries (the books and periodical variety, that is), and one of the most successful. In the ten years since its first release, Koha has expanded from serving as the integrated library system (ILS) at a single public library in New Zealand to more than 1000 academic, public, and private libraries across the globe. But the past twelve months have been divisive for the Koha community, due to a familiar source of argument in open source: tensions between community developers, end users, and for-profit businesses seeking to monetize the code base. As usual, copyrights and trademarks are the legal sticks, but the real issue is sharing code contributions.

Sad

???Indecent??? book seized from Wellington bookshop | Booksellers New Zealand

Book Haven???s owner Don Hollander (pictured right) was shocked when his store manager Sam Duckor-Jones told him that Phil Priest of Internal Affairs had called to say a complaint had been received that Book Haven had the banned book in stock and that he would come and seize it.

>>> Isn’t that sweet, they called Don to advise they’d be seizing it.