Firm booms as rural broadband need expands

WAIKATO TIMES

COUNTRY CONNECTION: Rural Link general manager Andrew Cooke says the broadband company expects to triple its subscriber base.

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A Hamilton rural broadband company, formed out of a high-tech dairy farm experiment, says it has only scratched the surface of rural broadband need and expects to triple its number of subscribers.

Rural Link a joint venture between Waikato University and software firm Rezare sprang from Waikato Innovation Park's Integrated Farm Management System project, which brought together a showcase of farming technology on a Walton dairy farm.

Rural Link general manager Andrew Cooke said the company was born out of the need to connect a farmer's shed and home broadband connections onto one account.

Farmers were gathering information from livestock and milk monitoring software in the dairy shed, downloading the information on to a memory stick, before driving to the house to download information on to another database in their office.

"Obviously it wasn't efficient and was a potential barrier to the farmers wanting additional technologies on the farm."

Mr Cooke, and Dr Murray Pearson at Waikato University, adapted a wireless broadband solution Dr Pearson had already developed, to work on the Walton farm.

The company had since tested its network, connecting eight rural Waikato schools and 50 homes around Te Pahu. Rural subscriber numbers were growing among farmers in areas without broadband access and with those put off by expensive satellite services.

"I think we'll easily double or triple the numbers on our network," Mr Cooke said. "That means moving from a few hundred to over a thousand. We're only just scratching the surface."

The company was on track to make its first profit this year and this month had employed its own staff, rather then being run by university and Rezare staff as their time allowed. Mr Cooke, also managing director of Rezare, expected to employ a manager for Rural Link and expand the company's staff from the current four in the near future.

The company was also working on its biggest project to date, connecting 2000 homes in Tuhoe lands in the Bay of Plenty.

The project, jointly funded by Tuhoe and the Government, involved installing and maintaining a wireless network.

The community based-project would see Tuhoe installing much of the physical infrastructure, including solar-powered repeaters.

"We got into this because we saw the value of this with farmers, but the community side is proving very popular," Mr Cooke said.

Individual subscribers paid $399 for connection and a $59 monthly fee.

Community-based plans were slightly cheaper and most subscribers also combined their telephone account with an internet phone.

The Waikato University CRCnet Project Team, which developed the technology used by Rural Link, won the information and computer technology science award at The Kudos science excellence awards.