Pipe dreams put Ashburton ahead
7th August 2010

Last Monday marked the deadline for companies to register interest in joining the Government’s ultra fast broadband project. So what? So, the future just got a bit closer.

Ultra fast broadband, or UFB (this industry spawns acronyms like oil gushing from a well), is the digital equivalent of an 8-lane motorway; and just as motorways unleashed the full potential of the motorcar so broadband unleashes the potential of the internet.

By comparison, the old dial-up connections that first hooked our computers to the world-wide web – and which are still a fact of life for some – are like piloting your car down a pot-holed dirt track. Dial-up’s fine for the emailed birthday greetings from your sister in Perth, but if she attaches a photo you wait…and wait…

We all cheered when broadband showed up several years ago. Accessing data at Megabyte speed lets us play around on Trademe, zip through online banking and peek at our kids’ latest holiday pics. At its best it allows us to play You Tube clips without the sound and pictures getting out of whack, but falls short of downloading movies. For users like businesses, schools and hospitals that have multiple computers accessing the internet at once broadband has become just too thin.

UFB lifts capacity from 2 or 3 Megabytes per second to as much as 100. This means that on a wet afternoon when the kids are driving me crazy I can download Shrek II in about 20 seconds and avoid carnage. For many businesses and public organisations UFB is fast becoming the minimum standard for operating successfully in the 21st century.

We all cheered again when the Government announced last year it will invest $1.5 billion to provide UFB for 75% of kiwis by 2016. Under pressure it coughed up another $300 million for a Rural Broadband Initiative to spread coverage to all but the most remote regions. The strategy will be in partnership with the telecommunications industry, which is a good thing because broadband networks cost a lot more than the Government’s commitment. Telecom claims to have already invested $3 billion in a network of fibre optic cables for broadband. They’ve been digging holes all over Tinwald in recent weeks just to prove it.

Other companies too are seeing opportunities in fibre networks, none more presciently than our own Electricity Ashburton which has been quietly stringing fibre optic cables along its network for some time and has formed partnerships with local schools and businesses. This has certainly been a smart move for our schools. Having a UFB “fat pipe” coming right to the gate pushes them to the front of the queue for further government funding to upgrade their old “skinny pipe” internal networks.

In this area Mid-Canterbury is well ahead of the pack. From my workplace at Southbridge School I look enviously across the Rakaia to the opportunities opening up for my teacher colleagues and their students in the Ashburton District. Selwyn District lags far behind in the race towards UFB. Perhaps this is due to the large shadow Christchurch city casts over Selwyn, stunting independent thought. More likely it is due to the absence of a locally-owned infrastructure company. Electricity Ashburton will be looking for opportunities to extend its network north of the Rakaia, with or without a successful bid for some of the Government pie.

At present UFB is synonymous with fibre optic cable. Fans of fibre talk it up as our biggest infrastructure investment since the national electricity grid. Others caution against flinging heaps of money at a technology that, in our fast-changing world, could be obsolete in a decade. Yesterday I was introduced to a new educational term, “M-learning.” As E-learning stands for the paraphernalia of computers and cable-based systems that serve them, M-learning stands for mobile, delivering the same services - and better - through the cell phones we carry in our pockets. How’s that for a “fat pipe” dream?