Guest Blog* from Bill Bennett.  Bill blogs here.

Communications Minister Amy Adams says New Zealand’s government supported fibre network has hit the halfway point.

In a press release the minister says: “The UFB build is going from strength-to-strength, with fibre being rolled out to communities up and down the country. The project continues to be on budget and well ahead of schedule”.

There’s little question about the project being on budget that’s because Chorus shareholders have to find the lion’s share of the cost. The other network builders have to invest their own money too.

Well ahead of schedule sounds right. But that’s partly because the companies picked the low-hanging fruit first.

Anecdotally I hear the build in Auckland, which makes up more than a third of the total project, is running behind schedule. Meanwhile people living in apartments are a long way behind any schedule.

Going from strength-to-strength is debatable.

Cherry-pick

To date only one-in-eight of the people able to connect to fibre have signed-up. Given that the UFB builders cherry-picked the richest suburbs as the first to get fibre, this doesn’t bode well.

Also, as Chris Keall points out at the NBR: “…that number includes the schools that have received free connections, network management and free broadband from Crown company N4L”.

And then there are the widely reported congestion woes. Since March TrueNet, the broadband speed monitoring service, has been reporting on poor performance during the evening.

Streaming video peak time

This is the streaming video peak time. It turns out the networks can’t cope with thousands of consumers all watching Netflix at the same time.

Even the fibre-only MyRepublic service struggles. This suggests a need for further investment in backhaul and ISP provisioning.

You could argue congestion is a sign of New Zealand’s broadband network going from strength-to-strength. It means there’s a healthy demand for data services even if consumers aren’t in a hurry to switch to fibre.

Demand to grow?

Optimists assume fibre demand will grow as streaming video gathers momentum with consumers.

Radio New Zealand has followed another fibre story undermining the strength-to-strength message:
“Crown Fibre Holdings – which is in charge of the Government’s $2 billion UFB rollout – wanted to ensure service providers such as Spark and Vodafone had to offer battery backup.”

There’s a remarkable Nine-to-noon interview where Katherine Ryan questions Chris Bishop, a policy and programme manager at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

Fibre battery backup

The man looks like either a liar or a fool as Ryan repeatedly asks why the ministry forced Crown Fibre Holdings to drop a requirement for ISPs to offer customer battery backup.

Time after time Bishop trots out an implausible line about “wanting to offer consumers a choice”. It doesn’t begin to address the issue.

Radio New Zealand had to get an official information request to find out about the ministry leaning on Crown Fibre and CFH’s response putting its objection to the ministry on the record is just as enlightening.

Ryan nails the key point when she notes that when this was happening suitable backup batteries cost around $300. If consumers thought they’d face that as an upfront cost, they wouldn’t sign for fibre.

Greater disclosure please

Craig Young from the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand (Tuanz) says the lobby group was working with the industry to try to ensure companies installing broadband were more upfront with customers about the need for batteries.

He says: “You probably don’t even know where to find a product disclosure code, for a product that’s being sold by Spark. You want to be told on the phone when you get this service that it won’t work when the power goes off, there should be a requirement on service providers to be a lot more upfront about these sorts of things.”

Batteries can now be bought for about $100 and Mr Young said telcos could upsell those to consumers.

Fibre, batteries, power cuts

The issue is tricky. You need battery backup because unlike copper telephone networks, fibre doesn’t work in a power cut. Radio NZ worries that means people can’t make emergency calls.

Yet, with mobile phone penetration now at well over 100 percent, few households would be cut-off in an emergency. Certainly not the kind of tech-savvy households in a hurry to buy fibre.

Except there are places like the recently built old people’s accommodation in Wellington that is fibre only. The residents have to sign for fibre accounts and, at first, couldn’t make regular phone calls.

Old school telephone on fibre

Spark came to the UFB project’s rescue selling what is effectively a virtual plain old-fashioned telephone service over a fibre connection product. Any ISP could offer a similar product, the technology was baked-in to the UFB design from day one, but the others have chosen not to invest in that area.

That still leaves the problem of fibre failing in a power cut, but then so does everything else. We’re dependent on electricity. After the Christchurch earthquakes the mobile carriers used portable generators to power cell sites. People still had to find ways to charge their mobile phones.

There are still whiffs of amateur hour about the UFB project. You might well ask why it took the government until the roll-out’s halfway point to address the access issues.

And there are still questions over the price ISPs have to pay Chorus to use the old copper network. Spark recently rekindled the copper tax debate pointing out that half the money a customer pays for broadband goes directly to Chorus.

While we’re on the subject of the copper tax some sources have reported the government has made heavy-handed threats of retaliation if that term ever surfaces again in public debate. Clearly it touched a nerve. And that’s something that wouldn’t have happened if the UFB network was genuinely going from strength-to-strength.

There’s is a lot that’s right about the UFB network. It’s a great idea. For the most part it’s been well executed. But let’s not delude ourselves. It’s not perfect, nor is it going from strength-to-strength. Not yet.

*Guest Blogs do not necessarily reflect TUANZ official position but are posted to encourage debate and discussion on pertinent issues.

This guest blog* is from a posting originally on the website of TUANZ past CEO, Ernie Newman. (Original post here)

“The Rural Connectivity Symposium today, run by TUANZ and the Rural Health Alliance, was inspirational. It was incredibly heartening to see these organisations leading the connectivity debate. And it delivered a first for me – the first time I ever recall the best speech of a conference coming from the mandatory Cabinet Minister. Amy Adams is a class act – she spoke from the heart, was informal, informed, and engaging.

It made me think.

And I concluded that we are pussyfooting around with rural connectivity.  Fibre to every farm – and marae, and rural health centre – is the end goal. And New Zealand should forget about interim steps. Lets go for gold now.

First, a few givens. Rural New Zealand is our economic powerhouse. The Internet is not about to go away. Demand for bandwidth will continue to grow exponentially despite phone companies acting like startled rabbits caught on the hop. People living in isolated places need more, not less connectivity than city dwellers. Bandwidth is far more essential in rural areas than urban for education, health, business, lifestyle and entertainment. It is a necessity and not a luxury. The economic and social case is overwhelming.

Fibre is the ultimate solution. It has massive capacity. Yes, cellular wireless is needed also, but primarily for voice traffic and for the premium data traffic where mobility adds value – cellular is an adjunct to fixed lines and not an alternative, just as basic sea freight and premium air freight co-exist. Yes, fixed wireless too has a role for a while, but long term it will never match the capacity of fibre to the premises. Satellite is excellent as a service of last resort, but has fatal flaws in speed and cost.

Fibre, beyond doubt, is the future.

Fibre to the Farm can be ridiculously easy. Northpower, with its considerable success in Whangarei, demonstrated that today. Lines companies are very, very good at the simple business of stringing lines along poles. Conversely phone companies worldwide preserve their business models by making such simple tasks seem absurdly complex.

Last century an earlier generation of Kiwis reticulated electricity all over rural New Zealand. They had few labour-saving devices. They cut down trees, fashioned them into poles and cross bars, dug or concreted them into the ground, and laboriously strung copper wires across them.

So if 20th century Kiwis could achieve that, then surely we 21st century ones can get fibre to farms? The poles already exist. We have technology like chain saws, bucket trucks and mole ploughs. We can minimise compliance costs by legislating for fibre telephone lines to be carried across poles with copper electricity lines without additional consent processes – that’s easy. Added visual pollution, if it exists, is negligible.

So let’s take a lesson from our ancestors. Stringing fibre along existing power poles is literally, a walk in the country.

The Minister should engage the electricity lines companies over this. She should ask them how feasible it would be to string fibre to every one of their rural electricity consumers, what it might cost, and how much they would have to charge telecommunications companies for the lease in order to make the investment viable.

Telecommunications companies have survived historically by intimidating and bamboozling governments into thinking their business is far more complex than is the case. Perhaps its time to slow down the new Ultra Fast Broadband and Rural Broadband programmes, so fibre to the farm over the electricity network can be seriously explored as an alternative.

If it works financially it will future proof our communications needs for many decades ahead, and provide a massive economic and social dividend.”

*Guest Blogs do not necessarily reflect TUANZ official position but are posted to encourage debate and discussion on pertinent issues.

TUANZ is a not-for-profit membership association which comprises over 150 members, predominantly large organisations with a strong dependency on telecommunications technology as well as small enterprises.   We also serve a representative group of SMEs and individual members. These small businesses and residential users are also the customers of our large corporate members, who are just as focused on the quality of their customers’ connectivity as their own.   We believe in the value of presenting professional and credible positions on issues that affect our members in line with our principles of encouraging digital uptake in our members businesses and homes through promoting fair and sustainable competition.

Recently four larger media organisations issued legal letters to a number of telecommunication retail service providers (RSPs) asking them to cease and desist in the use and marketing of the Global Mode DNS services.   They went further and demanded that the RSPs state that the use of these DNS services were illegal and should not have been used.  It is not TUANZ’s place to take sides in what is essentially a commercial and legal dispute between the companies, and we will always act impartially with the outcome for users in mind.

While we sympathise with the media organisations in that they believe they have purchased exclusive rights, we also believe that the legal case against Global Mode is unproven and until it is then no RSP should be required to switch off the service and thereby reduce competition for end-users.   If this means a case will be taken and decided in the courts then so be it, all parties will then have clarity around the current legal position.

We support the continued innovation by all New Zealand companies which provide users choice on how to consume content.  However the internet by its nature encourages the breakdown of traditional business models and geographic boundaries and so it is our view that the laws governing this need to be reviewed to ensure they work well for New Zealanders today and in the future.  These include copyright laws, as well as others such as tax laws to ensure that companies providing services in New Zealand are required to play by the same rules.  We would welcome a comprehensive review and would look to represent our members views at the relevant time.

Earlier this year I wrote about the website Wiki NZ and how its founder and chief Lillian Grace (@GracefulLillian) along with her team was working to make New Zealand’s publicly available data accessible to everyone.  As part of our general aim of talking about how we can use these great new broadband networks we suggested their website was a good place to start – well, now its a GREAT place to start.

Since my last post, they have been beavering away on the backend tech to deliver a great looking new website bringing that data together in one place and displaying it in simple graphs. Have a look here WIKINZ.  But they’re not stopping there – they are working on features and new levels of interactivity and collaboration so that more of us can use and view the data in ways that are useful to us.

So head over there and see what you can find – and also take the time to hear from Lillian introducing the site.

This post is a guest blog from Bill Bennett, Freelance Journalist

Broadband rarely gets discussed in the wider context of national infrastructure.

Yet the government-sponsored Ultrafast Broadband project and the Rural Broadband Initiative are just two of a series of major infrastructure projects transforming New Zealand cities.

To engineers there are two types of infrastructure. Vertical infrastructure means buildings while horizontal infrastructure means roads, railways, cycle tracks, water systems and communications networks.

Infrastructure makes cities liveable

Both kinds of infrastructure make places liveable. They underpin economic development.

In December Aecom New Zealand managing director John Bridgman gave me an insight into another way infrastructure investment is important when I interviewed him for the New Zealand Herald.

Bridgman talked about Auckland, but his comments apply just as much to other New Zealand cities.

Auckland ranks ten

He says the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Auckland as number ten when it comes to the world’s most liveable cities.

The survey leaves out Wellington and Christchurch because it only applies to the world’s 140 largest cities. Even so, the ideas are relevant across the country.

On one level, the EIU liveable city index is just a set of numbers, an accounting exercise. We shouldn’t take it too seriously or read too much into the numbers.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful or important.

Liveable means investment

Cities that rank high in the EIU index attract high quality investment. They are magnets to the brightest and most dynamic immigrants. They are places people want to visit and where they are keen to do business.

Getting on the top ten list is an achievement. Staying there is helpful. Bridgman wants us to move up the list.

Building fast broadband networks throughout New Zealand will move us closer to that goal.

To rank cities the EIU looks at 30 measures in categories such as culture and healthcare. Infrastructure is one category.

Not perfect, not far off

Each category is marked out of 100. A perfect city would be 100. The scores are crunched to get a single number. Auckland’s score is 95.7. Melbourne is in top place on 97.5.

A 92.9 score for infrastructure drags down Auckland’s total. If we can nudge that figure up Auckland would move from the top 10 to the top five.

In turn that would mean more high quality investment, immigrants and business opportunities.

Infrastructure is an interesting category when it comes to determining whether a city is liveable because the people already living in a city can do something about it.

Improving liveability

It’s near impossible to improve a city’s culture in the short-term. No-one can do much about the geographic setting once a city is founded. All the top cities are stable, safe and offer first class education, so there’s little room to move on those areas.

When assessing infrastructure the EIU looks at the quality of their road, public transport and telecommunications networks along with the international links. It also looks at the availability of good quality housing, energy and water.

Anyone familiar with Auckland knows our recent-year report for all those sub-categories is could-do-better.

The good news is that each area is being addressed. The Western Ring Road is not far from completion. Planning is under way for boosting the road network east of the city. There’s been a major water system upgrade.

Work to be done

There’s still work to be done building more good quality houses. Auckland’s electricity grid has been an embarrassment in the past, but things are changing. The next few years should see work begin expanding the rail network through the city. Other public transport projects are underway. They city is getting bike lanes.

And then there’s the broadband upgrade. At first sight it seems almost an afterthought.

Running fibre to every home and business in Auckland might add a few tenths of a point to the liveable city index score.

Where Australia lags

That might not seem much. Yet there are four Australian cities — Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Adelaide — ahead of Auckland in the EIU list. None of them will have full fibre to the premises networks soon.

Auckland will have its FTTP in place by the end of 2019.

Only 1.8 points separate Auckland from top ranked Melbourne. Auckland is only 0.2 behind Perth and 0.4 behind Sydney.

UFB

Finishing the UFB could push Auckland up two or three spots on the liveable city index. That alone gets us closer to the prize money. It’s an option Australia has rejected.

If those EIU numbers seem a little too dull and abstract to make sense, think of athletics. For an Olympic runner trimming two-tenths of a second can be the difference between a gold and a bronze medal.

As already mentioned, it’s important not to get too wrapped up in the details of one Liveable City Index. At best its criteria are debatable and there are other indexes that rank Auckland better or worse than the EIU.

Yet we can read the EIU index as a list of the work in front of New Zealand as we build a 21st century economy.

When the rest of the world catches up and builds fibre-to-the-premises networks, fast broadband will be a hygiene factor just like every other form of infrastructure. That is, something citizens expect and take for granted, something that will make them unhappy if it isn’t provided.

By then we’ll have something else to build to keep us out in front.

You can find this blog and other comments on Bill’s website at: www.billbennett.co.nz