Building Best Practices Broadband in New Zealand: Bringing Infrastructure Supply and Demand Together

Abstract

This paper adopts a productivity-based approach to assess the state of the New Zealand broadband market. This approach presumes that broadband penetration is a proxy for the ultimate objective of increased economic and social benefit which can be measured as increases in productivity. The state of the market is examined from the technology-agnostic perspective of competition for the provision of broadband services in terms of availability and price. This is then juxtaposed with a detailed analysis of New Zealand broadband purchase and utilization behaviors. Broadband purchase is seen in this analysis as merely another technology that may enable increased productivity from the use of information exchange over the Internet.