Quality of connections for what you pay in NZ is awful.

I went through the process of getting a prepaid sim card when I was there. It pretty much took a whole day out of my schedule. Photocopies of passport, visa and completion of a length form(in triplicate) and I had to provide multiple passport photographs. Returned the form to the vendor who then had to get it approved by an agent from the provider before he could issue me the SIM card. This was last year and I think I read somewhere the rules for foreigners have been tightened further.

I did this after college instead. Got an easy going highly paid QA contract in Melbourne which allowed me to have a far better time in Australia than what I could from doing a min wage job.

I went through the UK system, what being british and everything. At degree level I intialy started doing a straight CS course but later decided I want to be more specialised as programmer so moved over to do a BEng in Software Engineering. The most valuable part I would say was the sandwich year. At the time I didnt enjoy it too much and the money was awful(12grand a year down by London is nearly impossible to live on) but I ended with industry experience already under my belt by the time I left university last July. This has helped a great deal with the job hunting process and was even responsible(I know because they told me) for even getting the interview for my current job.