New Zealand It is a country that attracts attention for many reasons. Good for being where he is or for his many curiosities. As their rugby teamits strange and exclusive fauna or for having been the shooting scene from the saga of The Lord of the rings and The Hobbit. It also stands out for being one of the first countries to allow women to votefor having the people with him longest name in the world and for his sheep population, higher than people by ten to one. Another notable fact is that New Zealand lost internet in 2005 because of a rat.
Today, New Zealand can boast of having Internet access for more than 94% of its inhabitants. 4.63 million users out of a total population of 4.88 million. A job that started in 1989, when the internet came to universities. Today, this country is among the top 30 in connection speed according to the lists it makes okla. Using data from 2022, their average mobile internet speeds were almost 47 Mbps. And almost 95 Mbps on fixed connections. As in other countries, the optical fiber has unseated the previous connections DSL. And in mobile connections, 4G dominates, although 5G is already present in the main cities.
The most unfortunate internet outages
Thus, since 2005, New Zealand has entered the list of countries that stopped having connection to the internet because of a fortuitous event that involves some humor. On this list we find a 75-year-old woman who left Armenia without internet for several hours. The lady lived in Georgia and was looking for scrap metal when she came across the main fiber optic cable that connects the two countries. Apparently, she cut the cable with a shovel without realizing the disaster it would cause.
But there are connection cuts that affect entire countries and that they are not so glamorous. An example is the cut suffered by Mauritania in 2018. A fact that is reminiscent of similar cases such as that of the Channel Islands of 2016, caused by the anchor of a ship that sectioned three submarine cables. or the one of Egypt in 2013, caused by three divers.
And sometimes they occur catastrophic coincidences. Like the situation experienced in 2008 when there were three simultaneous accidents that affected several submarine cables. The result, slowdowns and cuts in Egypt, India, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Kuwait, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore, among others.
Internet in New Zealand in 2005
What were things like in 2005, the year of the accident? That year, some Internet providers introduced offers of 256kbps download of data. And at the end of the years, they began to see offers of 1 and 2 Mbps. Figures that would rise to 3.5 Mbps in the spring of 2006. Otherwise, Internet penetration in New Zealand was 84%. That was the percentage of regular internet users. And online shopping was common for 30% of New Zealanders. Regarding mobile connections, Vodafone and Telecom introduced 3G in the country to access the internet, although the prices were somewhat high.
Precisely, the two largest telecommunications companies in New Zealand in 2005 were Telecom and Vodafone. Telecom New Zealand it had been public and was privatized in 1990, becoming the property of two US and two New Zealand companies. For his part, vodafone It is known in many countries and is of English origin. The third largest company in the sector at that time was TelstraClear and was bought by Vodafone in 2012. As for Telecom, it changed its name to Spark New Zealand in 2014.
New Zealand without internet for hours
In June 2005, a rat bit into one of the optical fibre wires from Telecom New Zealand. As we saw before, it was the main internet operator at the time. As a result, New Zealand was left without internet for five hours. What affected citizens, companies and, especially, the New Zealand Stock Exchange.
Local media in the country, such as The Sydney Morning Herald, they echoed the next day through the AFP news agency. Under the headline “Blackout in NZ caused by rats”, he added that “the blackout also disturbed the banking and air transport and closed the country’s stock market, with communications interrupted in much of the country for five hours on Monday”. Apparently, “some rats chewed on a fiber optic cable which runs through the eastern part of the North Island, near the capital, Wellington”, according to a spokesman for Telecom New Zealand at the time.
But it wasn’t just the poor rats’ fault. Sometimes a fortuitous coincidence can turn a small accident into a chaotic situation. So it was. Going back to the newspaper chronicle of the time, “The problem worsened when the fiber optic cable in the western part of the island was accidentally cut at the same time by some workers in Taranaki, on the west coast”. It’s already bad luck. And it is that, as the same newspaper explained, “when operations were suspended, the stock market was in positive territory in his first session of the week.
What happened after the big blackout
The result of both practically simultaneous cuts affected mobile telephone communications and Internet access. Virtually all of New Zealand was left without internet. The cuts they overloaded the landlinesproducing constant cuts and falls during those fateful five hours. From Monday at 10:48 AM local time to the afternoon at 3:18 PM.
According to the German media Computer Woche, “Customers across the country experienced Serious service interruptions throughout the day as the data and voice communications between cities were disconnected. commercial services and bank payments they were inoperable and the New Zealand Stock Exchange had to close for much of the day. Government departments (…) were also affected, and the auckland police Couldn’t access your email.
Computer Woche raised his hands to his head New Zealand government inaction. He criticized that “an investigation into the lack of solidity in the network, an estimate of the losses incurred or a reassessment of the regulatory environment” was not going to be carried out. Apparently, the company responsible for the cables that connected New Zealand with the world, Telecom NZstated that “the probability that both cables fail at the same time It’s one in a million.” This yielded figures of “five minutes and 26 seconds of outage to their core network each year”.
The importance of submarine cables
The good news is that the great blackout in New Zealand it was not repeated. Yes there were changes in the local market telecommunications, but initially they had little to do with the incident. In 2006, Vodafone NZ bought a rival company and became the second largest telecommunications company in the country. For its part, the New Zealand government would open the doors for other companies to install your own fiber optic, cable or satellite network. All in all, Telecom continues to be the great ISP in the country, although now with the name Spark NZ.
And regarding the submarine connections With the rest of the world, today New Zealand would hardly be left without internet. On the north island it is connected by several cables. The main one, the Southern Cross Cable Network (SCCN)connects New Zealand with Australia and the United States since November 2000. The second is Tasman Global Access (TGA)active since 2017. And then there is Hawaii, which since 2018 also links Australia, New Zealand and the United States. In the summer of 2022 a third cable was added, Southern Cross NEXTheir of SCCN and with the same points of union.
The north island meets south through several submarine cables. aqualink (2001), Nelson Levin (2001) and Cook Strait (2020). And in the future, the south island will be connected to Australia via cable Hawaiki Nuiwhich will open around 2025. Twenty years later that New Zealand was left without internet due to a fortuitous accident blamed on rats.