Rod Oram: Fibre optic and number eight wire

"High-speed, mobile, wireless and satellite data are obviously essential for applications in paddocks, sheds and all the other remote places creating value in New Zealand."

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WITHIN A couple of months, fibre optic cable will run right into the few dozen homes in Mangamaire, connecting the hamlet 15km north of Eketahuna to the world with ultra-high speed broadband.

This is just one of countless stories from around the country about the sea-change in provision and use of broadband in rural areas over the past couple of years. Coverage is now ubiquitous. Where copper wires fail to deliver, mobile, wireless and satellite do the job. With the cost of service falling steadily, people are becoming ever-more ingenious in their usage.

These highly encouraging trends were identified and explored at the recent rural broadband symposium in Rotorua, organised by the Telecommunications Users Association and chaired by this columnist.

Progress has been dramatic since the previous event two years ago in Timaru. Then, much of the debate agonised over how to get any kind of broadband out to rural areas. Many services, such as BayCity Communication's use of the IPSTAR satellite, one of the world's largest, and relatively high-speed data services on mobiles, were in their infancy.

In contrast, the recent discussions in Rotorua focused mainly on all the vast and valuable opportunities for using broadband for business, education, health, government and social purposes.

For example, Landcorp has transformed the way it runs its 112 farms and 1.5 million stock units around the country. The old systems consisted of some 6000 notices of stock movements a year and tonnes of other paper.

Starting in 2005, it built a nationwide IT system that tied the business together for the first time. This has enabled new management tools that are improving the efficiency and value of the operations. Satellite's role in connecting Landcorp has fallen from 82% at the start to 62% today as ADSL over copper wires and wireless services from Kordia have developed.

TracMap, based in Mosgiel, is another example of the rapid growth of scale and sophistication of broadband use. It offers GPS tracking equipment for vehicles applying fertilisers. The onboard unit maps the paddock, fertiliser application and weather conditions. It then sends the data via cellular modem to the farmer for production purposes and the local council for regulatory compliance purposes.

Armed with these detailed maps, fertiliser truck drivers can be less skilled, yet work more accurately, and even at night, because the maps capture all the hazards of terrain and obstacles; and they reduce fertiliser use. Studies show gains of up to 20% in productivity, Colin Brown, the company's managing director, said.

Coming soon will be the ability to GPS-map crop yields in close detail across a paddock so fertiliser application can be tailored metre-by-metre to the soil's needs. While such GPS systems are common overseas for cropping in straight lines in relatively flat, vast fields, TracMap has devised an application for our hilly, small paddocks.

TracMap, which is growing at 10% a month, is offering a widening range of other applications such as irrigation control, heli-spraying and data collection in grape harvesting. While the likes of agricultural contractors are sold on the benefits of accurate data, there is still a big challenge in getting farmers to use such sophisticated tools in their own management, Brown said.

But the need to do so is accelerating rapidly. Supermarkets and their customers, particularly overseas, are demanding far more certainty on food safety, traceability and other sustainability issues; the science of farming in terms of breeding and management is getting ever more challenging; and economic drivers are forcing tighter, more insightful disciplines.

For all the buzz at the Rotorua symposium about broadband uses, there was also plenty of enthusiasm about how to build its infrastructure faster, cheaper and more easily. Again, the range of new approaches, peppered with examples, was in sharp contrast to Timaru two years ago.

Mangamaire, for example, is getting fibre-to-the-home, thanks to a public-private partnership and a big dose of DIY. Digital Nation, a company that has laid fibre optic cable in its hometown of Palmerston North where the big telcos wouldn't, is working in a partnership with Tararua District Council and FX Networks. They are building an open-access 140km fibre network to connect Dannevirke, Woodville, Pahiatua and Eketahuna with Palmerston North, their telco gateway to the world.

The network will run close to Mangamaire so Digital Nation's founder, James Watts, offered to help the community bring a spur to it and then into their homes. Much of the work on the few kilometres into the community and then around the houses is DIY, with technical help from Watts and friends.

On a bigger scale, Environment Bay of Plenty has formed a venture with six other local councils. BayBroadband is investigating the business case for developing an open-access duct network connecting Tauranga, Whakatane, Kawerau and Rotorua and from there to national and international networks.

Building such a duct network will help the councils use other infrastructure activities, such as rebuilding roads or replacing water pipes, as opportunities to lay the duct at minimal cost. These days, the fibre costs barely $1.50 a metre but digging trenches and resurfacing the road after can cost up to $400 a metre in urban areas.

As positive as all these developments are, they still beg a number of important questions. For example, how can rural areas aggregate user demand to justify investment in bigger, better broadband? When will those needs require fibre to the home and farm? What sort of business vehicles will deliver that and other technologies? And what role should government funding play?

Aggregating use is relatively easy, although much of the country is working through this in rather ad hoc local ways.

Fibre to the user is already necessary if, for example, you want to give a rural school or business high-quality video-conferencing or remote diagnostic tools to a doctor. Since cheap ways to route fibre are being pioneered in some localities, we can expect the ideas to spread fast.

That, though, won't fibre the country. Nor will it be the only solution. High-speed, mobile, wireless and satellite data are obviously essential for applications in paddocks, sheds and all the other remote places creating value in New Zealand.

Similarly, we are beginning to see examples of new corporate and government business vehicles that will help roll out fibre. But as yet, they are only cropping up here and there.

So, therefore, what's the role of taxpayer funding? The latest offering from the current government is the Broadband Investment Fund announced in the Budget.

The fund will channel $340m into local urban and rural initiatives and $160m into education and healthcare ones. But the money won't start flowing until June of next year. This left many people at the Rotorua symposium concerned about the delay and then, if there was a change of government, a disruptive policy shift.

For its part, National is offering $1.5 billion to get fibre to 75% of the homes in the country, a sum that would require roughly $1.5b of co-investment from the private sector. Judging by media reports, serious scepticism of the financial and practical realities of this was expressed by some delegates at Tel.Con9, a recent sector conference.

At the same conference, Paul Reynolds, Telecom's chief executive, made the plea for regulatory stability to give his company and the sector time to bed down the huge changes thrust on them in the past few years.

If it will take years of anguish, reports, policy changes and counter-productive effort to work our way through these issues, as it so often does on any subject, maybe the only practical solution is to move to Mangamaire. 

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