In my option, New Zealand internet didn't really get good until 2011. That is when Chorus was finally 100% separated from telecom. From 2006-2011, Chorus were

In my option, New Zealand internet didn't really get good until 2011. That is when Chorus was finally 100% separated from telecom. From 2006-2011, Chorus were inducing congestion in the ADSL backhaul to put non-telecom ISPs (particularly ISPs with all the high-bandwidth power-users) at a disadvantage. An ISP could buy unlimited bandwidth to the outside world, and give each customer ADSL 2+ connections of upto 24Mbit, but the backhaul between Chorus and the ISP to terminate all those ADSL connections was rate-limited to roughly 64kbps times the number of connections that ISP had. If all an ISPs customers went online at the same time and started downloading, everyone's throughput would drop to 64kbps. And Chorus would absolutely refuse to sell any extra backhaul bandwidth. It was in the best interest for all ISPs to have a healthy base of non-skilled users who barely used their ADSL connections, just so the rest of their users wouldn't get too congested. It was also around this time ISPs implemented various perks to encourage power-users to only download at night time. This all stopped in 2011, and the bandwidth caps that all ISPs were offering suddenly shot up.