Wait for broadband for remote schools disappoints Farmside

Rural broadband provider Farmside says it is disappointed that dozens of the most remote rural schools will have to wait until the end of the year to find out how the Government intends to help provide them with 10 megabit-per-second broadband.

The Government last week confirmed a $300 million plan to connect more than 900 rural schools with fibre-optic cable over six years and provide 97 per cent of rural households with fast broadband.

Details of a "Remote Schools Broadband Initiative" will be released "later in the year".

Farmside chief executive Tony Baird says the privately owned company could provide a 10Mbps satellite broadband service with a 15 gigabyte monthly traffic cap to 200 remote rural schools within two months if the Government helped subsidise the installation costs, which were typically $5000 to $6000.

Large dishes and special hardware are required for the fast service, pushing satellite broadband beyond the budget of some small schools. The upstream speeds on the satellite connections are 5Mbps, and the monthly charge would be about $200.

Cities such as Wellington and Christchurch are "awash with fibre" and any subsidy would be a small proportion of the sum the Government has allocated to broadband "to solve what is actually a real problem", he says.

Haast Rural School, which has just 14 students, and Winchester Rural School in South Canterbury are trialling the service.

Mr Baird notes the Education Ministry is being asked to make savings of $25m.

"If we had broadband to all their schools, we could save them a lot of money on travel."

Farmside sister company BayCity acquired the exclusive rights to wholesale 600 megabits of broadband capacity on Thai satellite operator Shin Satellite's Ipstar1 satellite in 2007.

It made an ambitious commitment to buy $100m worth of bandwidth and hardware from Shin Satellite, since renamed Thaicom, over 12 years.

Mr Baird says it is using about a quarter of that capacity and renegotiated its deal with Thaicom, without penalty, earlier this year, making its sales targets less onerous.

Farmside provides satellite broadband connections to about 11,000 customers, many of them farmers.

The peak time for internet use is between 5pm and 11pm, meaning it has excess capacity on the satellite that it could provide to schools.

With more uses for satellite broadband emerging, Mr Baird is confident it will sell all the capacity on Ipstar1's New Zealand transponders in time.

Its service is being used to provide satellite communications for 17 "hazmat" command trucks bought by the Fire Service that are designed to deal with chemical, biological, and radiological threats and which can also plug into fibre broadband and Telecom and Vodafone's 3G networks.

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