14 DAY TRIAL // Kim Dotcom has been talking big lately. Granted, he's been talking big all his life, but it intensified after MegaUpload was busted.
He's now working on Mega, a new file sharing site set to launch in January, he's also working on Megabox, a music service, and now he's said to be interested in reviving plans for a second undersea internet connection to New Zealand.
Currently, the country of 4.4 million people is served by just one communications cable. It's been serving the country's needs so far, though there had been talks of building a second cable for years now.
The Pacific Fiber project would have linked Auckland, New Zealand to Los Angeles in the US and Australia, with 13,000 km of fiber optic cable.
The project needed NZ$400 million, $330 million or €257 million in funding, but it was abandoned in August when the company behind it failed to find enough investors interested in the project.
Now, Dotcom is talking about reviving the project and says he and investors he finds will provide some of the funds.
Well, it's actually more a project of his own, but the end result would be the same, a new cable to service New Zealand.
Mega would be the cable's biggest customer, Dotcom wants to have a huge data center in the country dedicated to the new site. And that data center would eat up a lot of bandwidth.
Energy is also cheap and green in the country, a very important factor in the data center business.
That said, any data center in New Zealand, even with the new cable, would only serve the country, Australia and maybe some of the island countries in the Southern Pacific.
Beyond that, the latency would not make it worthwhile to build something designed to service an international market in such a remote place.
Still, so far so good, but Dotcom goes beyond this in some of his statements. Apparently, he believes he could offer broadband for home customers for free and only charge businesses and the government for using the bandwidth provided by the cable.
People would still pay a subscription to their ISPs, but it would be significantly reduced. Needless to say, some people are skeptical that this could be achieved.
Dotcom has every incentive to get New Zealand on his side, he's facing extradition to the US where prosecutors are out for blood.