Some more Corrections (Score 1)

Even here in Wellington, we don't have the means to transmit significant amounts of power through fibre optic cable. So you should assume that the reporter got mixed up. All they did at that stage was improve the redundancy of the power system, an obvious thing to do, although not obvious to the folks in Auckland, city of darkness. Probably by adding more underground power cable to link up substations more redundantly.

Someone mentioned monopoly. Actually this is not, you can still get WAN services from Telecom and Telstra-Clear, formerly Telstra Saturn. So your choices for linking to other businesses in the city are three, and for other cities two. Actually there is an extra choice if you are close, you can run your own cable to the building next door these days if you want to. That used to be illegal but is not any more.

Apart from this network, Telecom has fibre to all the suburban exchanges. Cable modem is available to some areas, and ADSL is widely available too.

Richard Naylor is quite a cool guy. I was talking to his then teenage son about 6 o 7 years back about home computers, he had a PDP8 to play with.