Newman slams Govt broadband initiative

Outgoing Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Ernie Newman fired a salvo at the Government's handling of its ultrafast broadband investment initiative as Chorus' permanent chief executive, Mark Ratcliffe, claimed broadband speeds were closing in on top-ranked South Korea.

Speaking at the national forum of economic development associations in Wellington, Mr Newman said the Government's heart was in the right place but the brain had "cut too many corners".

The "big missing element" was a "national digital architecture plan". "We are working through the implementation without having a clear vision of the end point we want to achieve."

The association was heavily courted by the National Party before the last election when it was seeking support for the UFB scheme to connect three-quarters of homes and businesses with fibre. Then communications spokesman Maurice Williamson is understood to have told Mr Newman at the time that the association's support was critical.

At the same time as resurrecting Tuanz's plea for a national digital architecture plan, first made in 2008, Mr Newman said thought needed to be given now to how phone and broadband services could be maintained during the transition to the fibre network.

"Everybody knows that it is going to take years to get a meaningful amount of fibre-to-the-home out there and somehow we actually need the phones to keep going in the meantime and we still need to get our broadband connections, miserable though they may now be by comparison," he said.

"It is going to be very important there is a managed migration from the copper to the fibre, irrespective of what role Telecom may have in the UFB process. We believe the copper migration has to be dealt with as a matter of government policy in parallel with the process instead of being left as part of the mix. It must not become buried in some kind of deal with Telecom as the owner of the copper in relation to their rollout of the fibre."

Mr Ratcliffe, who temporarily stood down from the helm of Chorus in May to head the Telecom team responding to the Government's UFB tender, said Chorus was now two-thirds of the way through its $500 million four-year project to roll-out fibre to roadside cabinets, shortening the average length of copper phone lines, and had laid 3000 kilometres of fibre in the past year.

The cabinetisation project would ensure 84 per cent of households could receive download speeds of at least 10 megabits per second (Mbps) and the average peak speed now being obtained from roadside cabinets was 13Mbps, he said.

"That compares with South Korea which is generally accepted to have the fastest broadband in the world, where their average speed is 14Mbps despite all the extensive deployment of fibre there." A Chorus spokeswoman said he was citing a 2009 Akamai report.

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