Kim Dot Com is right…

/in /by

About one thing anyway, and that is that we need fibre to 98% of New Zealand. 

5.2. Universal access

Fibre for all: The Internet Party believes that fibre broadband is essential infrastructure if New Zealand is to become a global leader in the digital age. The goal is fibre to the premises of the 97.8 percent of New Zealanders covered by the UFB and RBI programmes. While UFB is expected to provide fibre to 75 percent of New Zealanders by 2020, the Internet Party will deliver fibre to the remaining 22.8 percent in the RBI coverage area.

Rather than a single, “one size fits all” national programme, this will be achieved by co-ordinating a number of individual initiatives to:

  • Encourage and support Local Fibre Companies to expand their coverage areas.

  • Similarly, encourage and support companies with fibre laid before the UFB programme.

  • Catalyse, support, and remove obstacles for communities to self-organise, similar to BARN or other local initiatives.

  • Build spurs from fibre laid by Chorus under RBI.

  • Develop partnerships with iwi, marae, and local businesses.

  • Invite innovative proposals from local communities and continuously look globally for successful examples.

I won’t go into the details but the key thing here is that fibre is the future. There’s is an irony that technologies are always at their best at the end of their useful lives, examples of this are everywhere, the fastest steam trains were the last steam trains, the fastest piston engined fighters were also the last ones.

The situation often occurs when their is still a degree of equivalence between the old technology and the new one that is replacing it, early diesel trains weren’t that much better and later mark Spitfires & Mustangs were up there with the early jets but everyone could see the huge potential of the new technologies.

Its the same in the copper versus fibre debate, yes better speeds can still be extracted from clean copper over short distances, but when you read about speeds like this thats an unbelievable 43tb/s – thats terabits per second. And thats why fibre is the future, nothing else can deliver that kind of potential.

I think it also helps to understand 2 other current trends, one is that 1 gb/s is well on its way to being our baseline speed and the second is why we need a planned exit from the copper network.