Wellington rocks - & some answers (Score 1)

In answer to some of the questions posted:

Yes, you can run anything you want, and you get "real" IP addresses (we got 5!). Citylink is a piece of the internet set up like a LAN (i.e. no routers), not actually a LAN. They just provide the pipe, you pick the ISP you want (there are at least a dozen, IIRC) and pay them for the traffic (and your IP addresses).

As for cost, we pay NZD90/USD38 per month to Citylink for our Fast Ethernet "apartment" connection, plus NZD150/USD63 per month to our ISP for 500MB of traffic. That is, our office Fast Ethernet LAN is plugged into a Fast Ethernet NIC in a Linux box in the garage to the fibre in the street. When I say "office", it's an apartment that I live in and work from.

And you don't even have to buy any stupid cable/DSL modems. ;)

Traffic to other nodes on Citylink is free, so we can send big emails to our clients' ISPs' mail servers for nothing, and our ISP (paradise.net.nz) has RH/Debian/Mandrake/OpenBSD/FreeBSD mirrors, internet radio, and like, 40+ game servers (CS at 20-40ms pings all the time), so 500MB/month is almost enough.

Yes, there are a lot of on-line gamers in Wellington. In the last year or two, the internet cafe thing has taken off, driven by teenagers (mainly Asians, it seems) fuelling their Diablo II and Counter-Strike addictions. I blame NVIDIA. A lot of the players are pretty good. I'm not one of them.

Before I moved in here, I lived out on the beach (Lyall Bay) - literally right on the shore. And only a 20 min. cycle from town. We "only" had cable out there, but I was able to set up an IPSec VPN to here and share my traffic quota, which I thought was neat.

Nobody was supposed to know about the "optical power distribution" thing. Mr. Lipschultz (if that is his real name) has been "seen to", and will not be giving away any more of our secrets.

Yes, state-backed monopoly telcos are bad. We privatised ours, and now it isn't a monopoly in the same way that Microsoft isn't. Still makes too much money and largely does what it likes. At least there are alternatives.

Wellington kicks arse. I specifically moved back here from Europe to work on my own project because it met my criteria:

1. Good internet connectivity.
2. Relatively cheap.
3. Good cafes/atmosphere.

London's nice, but SOTA there is ISDN... Now if only the Kiwi dollar was a bit stronger.

--
"Tonight, Michael, I'm going to be... Donald Knuth!"