Its been asked before

From my understanding many years ago somebody from Israel made a rough sketch of NZ for the live map. The live map got updated some time ago with a new feature that included sea land marks from WME.

So now the map is a combination of the original inaccurate sketch plus sea landmarks form WME.

In my experience "Telecom" has the best coverage but "Vodafone" is not far behind

I would choose between one of those. There are others but for such a short time I going to suggest that price is not as important as performance

I myself use 2degrees

What was the waze experience like in the south island?

This is the same with Godley Head, at the entrance to Lyttelton harbour.
I'm a UK Wazer, but I'm coming to NZ for my 11th visit for a month, so can any one recommend a good mobile data provider?

Sorry about not replying! I ended up using 2Degrees as a NZ relative had an unused sim.
$19NZ a month for 500MB data, unlimited texts and free weekend calls to NZ landlines. I'd have to pay twice this in the UK for this combo.
Had 3G signal virtually everywhere I went, except for when I was in the middle of Otago, north of Outram (a.k.a. middle of nowhere!) and on SH1 near Oamaru.

Again, sorry for the slow reply! I found it to be most satisfactory and only had to resort to Navigon once, when I reported Mcraes road as missing, other than that I had a almost flawless experience.
The UK Telecom providers could do to look at how NZ providers do provide a service almost everywhere, no matter how remote.

At last count I think there were around 7 or so mobile carriers, but I believe most would piggy back onto a primary carrier like Telecom or Vodafone.
I thought that Vodafone had better data rates or has Telecom come to the party now and met these?
I heard from a few friends good things about 2degrees who have their own network and roam on Vodafone's network in places they don't have their towers.