It’s been a long time coming, but you’ve done it. Perhaps you’ve watched as the construction crews dug trenches next to roads near you, forcing endless orange pipes into the ground. Perhaps you’ve held a flyer in trembling hands, or beheld an email, announcing the most momentous news of the last 5 billion years or so – fibre is here. All this has been done, and you’ve finally ordered your fibre connection from your ISP of choice (which is, of course, Bigpipe). All that stands between you and the holy grail of ultra-fast fibre broadband is… what?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

But first, in case you didn’t know:

What is fibre?

Fibre is broadband that runs over fibre-optic cables. This is done in much the same way as sharks in Austin Powers: The Spy That Shagged Me: with fricken lasers, as opposed to lesser broadband technologies like ADSL and VDSL, which work over copper wires.

Fibre is quicker than copper because copper is limited to the speed that electricity flows, whereas fibre carries data at the speed of light. Literally. It works like this: let’s say you want to visit a website. We’ll say it’s YouTube. You type in youtube.com in your browser, your computer has a chat to your router, which talks to the modem (this is a slightly shorter conversation if your modem and router are the same box) which has a yarn to a box on the wall, called an optical network terminal, or ONT. The ONT takes your request, turns it into fricken lasers, and zips via your ISP’s fibre network which connects to the Southern Cross trans-Pacific cable which connects to another network in the US which connects to the server farm, which starts streaming the requested data back to you. (This, of course, is dramatically oversimplified, and strictly speaking it’s also wrong, but the gist is right.)

All this happens quite quickly. Exactly how quickly is a bit too fast to actually comprehend. I just checked, using a process called “pinging”, and it took my computer 1.8 milliseconds to have 56 bytes worth of data-chat with YouTube. To put this into perspective, a full lightning strike takes around 50 milliseconds.

Speed isn’t everything – you can get low pings on copper connections as well – but the real trick of fibre is in the sheer amount of data it can carry at these high speeds. To put it another way, if we say the internet is made of pipes of varying capacity, fibre is a really big pipe.

See what we did there?

Now that we’ve explained how our brand name is actually a pun, it’s back to the fibre install process.

If you’re the first person at your residence to have ordered fibre broadband, there’s plenty to do before you can get connected. When you first contact your ISP – which, we’re just going to assume, is us – to get fibre, we get in touch with your LFC and tell them you need fibre. Then your LFC does what they do best: they dig a hole.

Everything You Never Wanted To Know About LFCs But Were Afraid To Ask

“But what is an LFC?” you are probably shouting loudly at the sky right now. We’re glad you asked. There are several LFCs, or Local Fibre Companies, in New Zealand, and their job is building and maintaining fibre lines. First, there’s Chorus – which, confusingly, is not actually an LFC, but we’re going to treat it like one for the purposes of this article. Chorus is half of what was Old Telecom, which used to be a government-owned infrastructure company. Old Telecom got sold and had an awful lot of fun being a monopoly for a decade or two before being broken up by the government into two bits: Telecom and Chorus. Chorus kept running the lines and Telecom became a retailer of phone and internet services. After a while, Telecom decided to stop confusing everyone who thought they still ran everything and changed their name to Spark, which confused everyone even more until everyone just kind of got used to it. Chorus still runs the lines, plus they got given the lion’s share of the fibre installation contract by the government, and every internet service provider in the country has to use them for nearly all of their internet service provisioning stuff.

The LFCs Bigpipe works with are Enable (who look after Christchurch and bits of Canterbury) and Ultrafast Fibre (who are fibre-ing Hamilton and a few nearby Waikato towns).

What happens after we talk to your LFC

Unlike the decades-old copper network that ADSL and VDSL run on, fibre is brand new. And because New Zealand’s ultra-fast broadband build utilises fibre to the premises (or FTTP) it means, essentially, that a man in a van is going to come and dig up your front lawn, or perhaps your driveway, and put some laser tubes under it.

If you’re a renter, this is the first hurdle – your LFC needs to get permission from the landlord to come and dig your driveway. Usually this isn’t a major problem, although it can take a while. Most landlords like the idea of having fibre available, though; it’s a great way to make more rent.

(Unless you have a lawn or a driveway that can’t be dug. That’s a whole different problem.)

This is far from the last hurdle. Do you live in a mixed dwelling – like a duplex, or an apartment? If you do, your LFC legally must get permission from every party with an interest in the dwelling, and this can take a while.

Once all the permissions have been signed, your LFC has to do their digging, and as this requires an actual person to show up with a spade, and thanks to everyone (understandably) wanting fibre all at once, there is a bit of a shortage of spade people at the moment. So this bit might take a while.

After this, your LFC must show up again at your property (which they also need permission to do, because of a lingering societal reticence towards strange people showing up uninvited in your house and drilling holes) and install the ONT, which takes the form of a white box that sits on your wall. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, might take a while.

You may have noticed all the times that we said “this might take a while”. These can add up. Getting fibre can be a long, and occasionally frustrating, process. The good news is: a.) we do our absolute best to smooth out the bumps in the road b.) you can get excellent broadband with Bigpipe’s ADSL or VDSL offerings while you wait and c.) If you’d like to ask us anything about getting fibre, we’re just an email away – and there’s no need to listen to  40 minutes of music  to be told “Er, we’ll need to ask your LFC. Please call back and wait on hold tomorrow.”

But good things take time. Eventually, the ONT is connected to the laser tubes in your lawn, which connect to the internet, your LFC tells us that the ONT is connected, we flip the appropriate switches, and you are connected to much-faster-than-lightning fibre broadband!

TL;DR: Fibre can take a while, but it is definitely worth waiting for. Fibre broadband isn’t just fast – it’s also very reliable. Once you’ve got it, you’ll wonder what you ever did without it. So why not order your fibre today?

We’re not sure why we thought of asking Bigpipe’s Facebook fans to come up with what the most useless thing they could spend $100 on. But we did, and our fans delivered. We suppose that Bigpipe’s high-quality yet highly-inexpensive internet has given them oodles of disposable income and plenty of time to decide what to do with it. Because some of the stuff that they came up with… yeesh. It made our eyes bleed pain-tears and had us crying ourselves to sleep with sad existential laughter. Useless. So useless. What’s the point of living in a world with endless problems, and endless solutions that address none of them?

Here are some of them. Lots of them, actually.

Wrap battle

“$100 worth of industrial grade giant bubble wraps,” suggested Anthony Stark, who is clearly tired of saving the world as Iron Man and clearly just wants to spend a few thousand hours squeezing and popping things.

Why.

What a grate idea.

These boots are made for talkin’

If you’re introverted and don’t want company, just wear these monstrosities. Maybe put some Nickleback on. Soon there will be no shortage of people desperate to leave you alone.

Goddamn it

Do you have too few holes in your wall? Rectify the problem with this!

What a glovely idea

Be honest. You’ve wished your hands were sandwiches and your fingers were ham.

Extra-private browsing

Sometimes, private browsing just isn’t enough. You need a whatever this is!

O wheely?

No-one in the history of the universe has ever needed a fork that is also a pizza wheely cutty thing. Happily, that didn’t stop someone inventing one.

Soft drinks and chill

We asked for useless things, but someone thought posting this very good idea would be a good idea, which it was not. A tiny fridge to store a single can in? Why don’t we own this already?

I get knocked down, but I get up again

Over 90 percent of all baby-owners have expressed a desire to alter the faces of their infants so they look like the hideous cover to the hideous album “Tubthumping” by the hideous Chumbawumba. Now they can!

Keeping abreast of trends

We have it on good authority that, when the photo for this box art was taken, this was the only one of hundreds in which the model was not crying with laughter at the recognition that this was the lowest moment in her life, and that anything that happened to her in the future could not possibly be as bad as this.

Ab-solutely not

The thing we like most about Ab Hancer is that whoever came up with the thing must have had the following conversation in their head at least once.

“Say, Oliver! You’re looking like you’ve been working out your core recently!”
“A! Ha! No, Abdul, not at all – I live on beer, sour skittles, and chips. No, this is my Ab-Hancer! It’s a grid of plastic that I tape to my stomach!”
“Brilliant! Where did you get it? I must own one!”

Cat-alogue item

At first glance, this 3D-printed Cat Armour is merely a useless invention that your cat would tear you limb from limb rather than wear. On second, third, and thirtieth glances, it is still that. Around the thirty-first glance, though, something magical happens. You think “Actually, my cat has been getting into a lot of fights lately, and could do with some armour.” Naturally, you buy a $4000 3D printer. Your wife argues with you – “That was meant to be the money for taking a holiday, just the two of us! We haven’t been on holiday in years! I miss us, Martin! What have we become? I just don’t know you any more!” It’s the final straw in your wreck of a relationship. She leaves, and in the divorce, she gets both the children and the cat. You are left with cat armour and the knowledge that it was all worth it.

A likely story

Mark Zuckerberg has already bought this technology student for $40 billion, and now keeps him in the basement at Facebook.

Bitesaber

The Force Awakens has been revealed to feature a scene with Luke Skywalker eating ramen out of Darth Vader’s mask with a pair of these lightsaber chopsticks. The only dialogue in the scene is Luke endlessly repeating the word “midichlorians,” then laughing hysterically. The scene is 40 minutes long, and critics are already calling it the highlight of the film.

Wait butt why

We’re not surprised that this post has 2,855 comments, and we’re sure all of them are variations on the word “Finally.”

Hypewriter

When news of this invention first broke, over ten thousand hipsters died simultaneously of happiness.

Handy

We hope these come as part of a tw0-for-one offer in which you can also get “Glundies (TM) – They’re gloves for your junk!”

Also handy

We’d buy this. It’d annoy the right kind of people.

The Winner

As always, there can be only one. The one, in this case, is Lennon Cameron, who told us the following sob story. “I’ve already brought a cardboard Britney Spears online,” wailed Lennon, “but she gets lonely. I need a noughties Justin Timberlake to keep the dream alive. #Britneyandjustinforever.”

Lennon, we never expected to see the sentence “I’ve already brought a cardboard Britney Spears online, but she gets lonely” in our lives, but now that we have, we’ve realised it was all we needed all along. Just like all cardboard Britney needs is a cardboard Justin Timberlake. Take the $100. Buy yourself your cardboard carouser. Send us photographic proof. Do this, and you win much more than $100, Lennon. You win everything, forever.

At Bigpipe, customers are love, customers are life. We want to share that love with the rest of the world, so we’re showing off a few of our amazing customers. The first of these stunning individuals is @VinLew. 

Your Name Here: Vincent Rijlaarsdam

Vin looks like this.

A/S/L?
21 / Sometimes / Dunedin

Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m flatting with four others, studying IT, and into the outdoors, sailing, and long romantic walks to the shower.

What do you do for a crust?
Isn’t it called the heel?

Well, technically, yes, but come on. Who even knows that?
Me, apparently.

What Bigpipe plan are you on?
The Gigatown one.

What attracted you to our Big Pipes?
Not needing to worry about flatmates maxing out the pipes with Netflix or Linux ISOs.

Ah, those bandwidth-hungry Linux ISOs. No worrying about them with Bigpipe! On that note, what’s the best thing about the Bigpipe service?
The customer service and dank memes.

What’s your favourite thing that you use your Bigpipes for?
Pretending to work on assignments, sending people gifs (with a soft ‘g’, like it should be).

It’s a hard G. Obviously. Look, no-one talks about “jifs”, unless they want to sound…  Never mind. If Bigpipe were an animal, what would it be?
Bigpipe is the internet, and the internet is cats.

Fair emeowf. Favourite video game right now?
Minesweeper.

LOL no it’s not. What is the dankest meme?

Thanks mr skeltal! Next question: Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized men, or 1 man-sized duck?
Probably 100 men dressed as ducks.

Makes sense. Wait, no it doesn’t. OK. Tell us a joke. 
Can I steal somebody else’s?

Ha, ha, that’s not a joke! Link us to your current favourite video (or thing) on the Internet
Hillary Clinton describing her legs.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_yxGsWHx9o?start=197&feature=oembed&w=1080&h=608]

What is your spirit animal?

Anything you’d like to add?
2+8

It’s 10. Thanks for playing, Vin! We wish you the very best bones and calcium. 

If you want to make a happy ending for your own Broadband, sign up now at bigpipe.co.nz.

Gidday readers. I’m Josh and I am the resident Marketing Wizzard here at Bigpipe Towers. You may remember me from such blog posts as the one where I used The Simpsons memes to explain why Bigpipe is awesome and/or get a job at Bigpipe. But today I want to talk about something serious: men’s health.

Here at Bigpipe, we like to celebrate serious things, like The Internet (It’s Serious Business!™) with things that are less serious (like cat memes). Movember fits into that nicely, much like a cat in a glass container.

Serious business.

There’s no better way to get serious about men’s health than Movember, and there’s no better way to do Movember than by starting by shaving off your beloved facial hair. This is what I looked like before Movember started:

File photo

As you can see, I favour hiding my face behind a well-cultivated hair-garden. It’s been this way for quite a while. Occasionally I’ll shave, because summer is hot, or something, then I’ll remember that I don’t actually like how my face looks when I don’t have hair on it and I’ll concentrate really hard and grow it all back in a couple of hours. I wish.

Part of the reason I have a beard is because it’s so much easier than shaving. Shaving is a pain in the face. The razor cuts you up like a, uh, razor, it leaves you with a rash and reeking of stuff you got given for Christmas by a relative who clearly hates you, and if you decide to take a break for just one day your face takes on the characteristics of barbed wire, sandpaper, and a cat’s tongue all at once, somehow. It’s not worth it. Having a beard is just better. It’s like a nice soft springy pillow attached to your face that you can also store food in if you need to. It’s also probably the only body part you can get away with gently stroking in public. There are many reasons to grow a beard and very few not to have one, but Movember is a good cause, so I decided to lop it all off, in exchange for your kind donations.

I documented the process, because this is 2015 and if I hadn’t done it someone else probably would have flown a drone down, filmed the whole thing, and uploaded it to a shaving fetish website.

It Begins.

I took the clippers and headed for the deck, which has a neat little space between it and the fence that we use to store leaves, dirt, cat shit, and facial hair. I plugged in a couple of extension cords, and started shaving.

My wife hates this one.

I quite like this one. I think this style makes me look somewhere between the bad guy from The Matrix and a 55 year old man who found Jesus in the water stains in his mother’s bath-tub.

Nobody with functioning eyes likes this one.

I call this one “Young Walter White but in an alternate universe where he got cancer at age 32.” I also look quite a lot like my Dad, who, from 1990 through 2001, had glasses, a moustache, and would tell anyone within several metres about Jesus at the first opportunity. We didn’t watch The Simpsons when I was kid and Dad could never figure out why people kept calling him Flanders.

oh god why

I call this one the “Reverse Hitler.” I worry for my future employment prospects putting this up, but I keep repeating to myself: “Good cause. Good cause.”

+4 to Streamlining, -20 to Charisma

This is the final result. I hate it and so do you. Immediately after shaving I had a horrible urge to scrape my beard out of the gap between the fence and deck (avoiding the cat shit if possible) and superglue it back on my face, where it belongs. Fortunately my wife held me back with strong threats of divorce. I can’t wait to get my poor beard back, so if you have enjoyed this mad ramble and would like to donate to the men’s health awareness cause, you can (should!) do so here. 

Also you should probably sign up to Bigpipe, we have good broadband internets.

Here at Bigpipe Towers, we had a dream. A vision, of an internet, united, under a single flag. Naturally, the only way to get one was via a competition, involving random members of the public, most of whom had little or no design experience, and a panel of non-designers judging the winner. We threw open the doors, inviting users of Twitter, Facebook, and Geekzone to submit their ideas, with the promise of the winner’s design flying proudly on a T-shirt. They delivered. Here they are: the Flags For The Internet.

Illuminating

Gabe Newell presides over this deep and meme-ing-full piece, composed by Facebook user Quentin. “i personally think this is the better version of the red peak flag design. i have a little competition for you. Haw many bigpipe logos can you spot hiding amongst the memes and can you see John Cena.” We don’t know about John Cena, but if you look closely you’ll see the Bigpipe logo in the Illuminati eye, which can only mean HALF LIFE 3 CONFIRMED.

Born just in time to Internet Explorer 4

“A Mosiac of internet popups, with the IE 4.0 logo sitting in front!” warbles Geekzone user “macuser” triumphantly, adding that there is also a .gif you may view, at this link. 

Like rain on your wedding day

Ahaha. Yes, yes. We see what you did there, Geekzone user Bananabob. We see what you did there.

Internet is life

“As you can see,” writes Internet Poet Michael, via the Bigpipe Facebook, “Here this is my majestic flag of the internet, 69 hitmarkers up there add that extra 69 dankness to my flag, nice amount of memes not too much, beautiful over all, If you look closely you’ll find the big pipe logo.” We think he’s 360 noscoped it, so we’re sending him some Cool Stuff!

It’s a goat, see? 

It is obvious what this is. It’s two incredibly poorly drawn hands (symbolising the general level of intelligence of Internet comments) holding either side of a ring (symbolising unity). In the middle, the red rising sun of knowledge shines out of a black hole of ignorance. Together, these visual elements go together to show how we are all united around the great cause of the Internet.

There is no way this could be anything else.

Hardcore Gore

“What Kiwis want is the traditional internet flag they have had from the beginning,” says Facebook submitter Anja. “Al Gore: supreme leader, creator and founder of the internet, features in the top left corner. To the right is a tasteful constellation of four of our brightest stars and of course all of this wrapped in facebook blue (#4c66a4). This authentic and regal flag looks right at home amongst all the other great flags of the world.” A solid effort. It’s almost the President of our flag comp, but not quite.

This one makes us feel guilty for some reason

Michael Coleman’s entry serves as a stark symbol of what we’re doing / what we’ve done with the best years of our lives. It would have won, but it makes us want to take a long hard look at ourselves and re-think our lives, and we can’t have that.

Nostalgia

This, designed by Facebook-person Coster, has more symbolism than Red Peak or either of Kyle Lockwood’s silver fern-sporting monstrosities could ever aspire to. Nyan Richie says “Deal With It.” Suzy Cato knows what feels good, man. And John Campbell is crowned our rightful king, holding the baubles of office – delicious, gone but not forgotten, Tangy Fruits.

Problem?

Twitter’s Drew Broadley will be back in a minute; he’s just putting his troll face on.

Troy Cornwall didn’t read the T&Cs

Troy Cornwall had a stellar effort. It might have won! But it didn’t.

The Internet is for cats

ArsTechnica editor and Twitter user @MeganGeuss was not actually involved in the competition or, indeed, anything vaguely related to it, but we liked this image of hers, hashtagged #InternetFlag, enough to put it in the running.

Talk nerdy to me

“actually, If I were to make a non animated interwebs flag, Id make it based on the kiwi flag (because this country is the best obviously) and go geek with it,” says Geekzone user fizzychicken. We say, oh. Oh yes. That’s very nice. We like that a lot. It’s New Zealandy, it’s nerdy, it makes a great flag for the internet. It’ll also look good on a shirt! Well done; you win the Internet and a $200 JB Hi-Fi voucher.

*Lies.