New Zealanders want faster broadband and they want it without a usage cap, and Snap is ready to offer both.

Snap’s nationwide 200/200Mbps Ultra-Fast Broadband commenced this week providing the fastest broadband on offer throughout New Zealand, priced at $111.50 a month with an unlimited use add-on available for an extra $8 a month. To date, the service had only been available in Auckland.

Kiwis can sign up for Snap on the Chorus network for the fastest 200/200Mbps speeds. Those served by Enable or UltraFast Fibre will see upload speeds reduced to 20Mbps for now, but will also be compensated with a lower monthly price: $87.71.

A wireless gateway to support the faster speeds will be provided at no extra cost to customers signing up for 200Mbps service.

Snap’s new service comes as a result of New Zealand’s deployment of fiber networks and an end to usage caps, consumption billing, and/or bandwidth throttling. Snap has been well received in New Zealand because it guarantees no traffic shaping, traffic management schemes, or mandatory usage caps. This comes at a time when North American providers are trying to force customers into usage-capped broadband plans and wireless carriers insist on using traffic shaping and caps.

“There is no faster commercially available service across the whole country today,” said James Koers, general manager, Snap Retail. “We’ve built our own network to ensure customers receive the fastest, most reliable service possible. We don’t cache or proxy or shape traffic in any way, giving customers peace of mind that they’re getting the service they expected and paid for.”

Koers adds there is a clear demand for fiber optic broadband across the country.

“Today, two out of every three of our sign-ups are for a fibre service which shows New Zealanders’ appetite is increasing for UltraFast Broadband as it becomes available,” said Koers. “200Mbps is just the beginning though as we’re now trialling Chorus’ new 1Gbps residential service.”

PC Magazine has rated Snap the fastest broadband provider in the country.

The average Netflix subscriber now watches 93 minutes of online video a day just from Netflix, and that adds up to 45GB of usage on average a month.

The Diffusion Group released that estimate in a new 35-page report (priced at $2,495) based on streaming data released by Netflix, and it shows a 350 percent increase in viewing over the last ten quarters, adding up to more than seven billion streaming hours in the last quarter alone.

Consumers with usage-limited broadband accounts will find online video viewing increasingly eating away at viewing allowances, but when 4K HD video arrives in the not too distant future, usage caps of 300-500GB a month will seem paltry. That new video format consumes up to 7GB per hour, and if current trends stay true, the average Netflix viewer streaming at the highest video quality could find their monthly Netflix traffic consumption rising to more than 300GB a month.

More people will read this story than Atlantic Broadband has current customers for its 1Gbps broadband project in Miami.

“Atlantic Broadband is proud to be the first company to deliver 1 Gigabit Internet service to its customers here in the Miami Beach area,” said David Keefe, Atlantic Broadband’s senior vice president and general manager of the South Florida region. “While other companies are talking about what they will be doing, Atlantic Broadband moved forward and started offering this service in one of its communities. We look forward to extending access to our Gigabit Internet service to other properties and communities within our Miami footprint.”

Although Mr. Keefe isn’t being modest, his company’s gigabit broadband coverage area certainly is.

At present, the company serves just 40 properties with the super high-speed broadband service in high-income Indian Creek Village — the 8th richest community in the United States.

The tiny village of Indian Creek, in the Miami-Dade area, is made up of 40 properties and is the 8th richest community in the U.S.A.

Designed to appeal to residents who can spare no expense, the Atlantic Broadband package also includes more than 350 TV channels powered by TiVo, integrated access to Netflix, and unlimited phone service for up to four lines.

An Atlantic Broadband spokesperson wouldn’t reveal the price of the package, and admitted customers cannot choose standalone broadband-only service.

“The needs of Indian Creek Village were unique so custom service packages were created that include all of Atlantic Broadband’s TV services, Gigabit Internet and four phone lines,” a spokeswoman told Multichannel News. “Currently, there is not a published a standalone price for Gigabit Internet.”

Residents in the wealthy enclave include Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima, Spanish singer Julio Iglesias, his son Enrique Iglesias, Robert Diener, co-founder of Hotels.com, Edward Lampert, hedge fund billionaire and owner of what is left of Kmart and Sears, Don Shula, retired football coach, Charles Bartlett Johnson, mutual fund billionaire, billionaire investor Carl Icahn and former Philadelphia Eagles owner and billionaire art collector Norman Braman.

Other famous residents both past and present have included Beyoncé and Jay-Z, pro golfer Raymond Floyd, coach Rick Pitino, U.S. Senator George Smathers, Sheik Mohammed al Fassi, television host Don Francisco, co-founder of Calvin Klein Barry Schwartz, radio magnate Raul Alarcon, coal and oil executive, heiress and philanthropist Suzie Linden, Arthur I. Appleton, President of Appleton Electric Company and founder of the Appleton Museum of Art and Bridlewood Farm, and his wife Martha O’Driscoll a former Hollywood actress.

Atlantic Broadband has not ripped out classic cable infrastructure for its less-well-to-do customers outside of the village in the Miami-Dade area and relies on RF over Glass technology for its network extensions. That allows the company to keep its legacy equipment in place while giving some residents access to fiber and others traditional coaxial cable.

Atlantic serves an island of customers in the Miami Beach area, but most of Miami gets its cable service from Comcast. Competitor AT&T has promised fiber upgrades and gigabit speeds for its own customers in the Hialeah, Hollywood, Homestead, Opa-Locka, and Pompano Beach areas, but no time frame has been announced for the upgrade.

Atlantic Broadband will have one advantage over AT&T U-verse. It does not have usage caps.

Atlantic Broadband serves around 230,000 residential and business subs in western Pennsylvania, Miami Beach, Maryland/Delaware, and Aiken, S.C. It is owned by Cogeco Cable of Canada.

There is a way out for AT&T U-verse customers stuck dealing with the company’s arbitrary 250GB monthly usage cap — sign up with U-verse reseller DSL Extreme for the same Internet access with no usage caps whatsoever.

Today, DSL Extreme announced the introduction of trueSTREAM in 21 states serviced by AT&T’s U-verse fiber to the neighborhood system. Much like Earthlink’s reseller agreement with Time Warner Cable, customers can transparently switch between the two providers and receive essentially the same service at a different price point.

The biggest selling point of trueSTREAM is that it has absolutely no usage limits.

DSL Extreme has signed a contract with AT&T to offer the service in states including California, Texas, Illinois, and Florida, among many others.

Customers don’t need to have a phone line to subscribe. They will need to lease a wireless gateway router ($6.50/mo) from DSL Extreme and the rate plans are similar to AT&T’s own U-verse broadband offerings:

• Value ($17.95/mo) 768/384kbps
• Plus ($22.95/mo) 1.5Mbps/384kbps
• Pro ($27.95/mo) 3Mbps/512kbps
• Elite ($32.95/mo) 6Mbps/768kbps
• Max ($37.95/mo) 12/1Mbps
• Max Plus ($42.95/mo) 18/1.5Mbps
• Max Turbo ($52.95/mo) 24/3Mbps
• Power ($62.95/mo) 45/6Mbps
• Power Plus ($92.95/mo) 75/8Mbps

Professional installation is now free of charge and an optional one-year contract delivers other extras, such as a static IP address. A Supplier Surcharge Recovery fee of $2.88 per month applies. Customers can pre-qualify on the company’s website.

The coverage area of trueSTREAM will extend the company’s reach overnight to 30 million potential customer locations, growing to nearly 60 million by 2015.