Broadband in rural communities

Broadband will boost rural communities

The Rural Broadband Initiative has been put into place to bring significantly better broadband services to rural areas, which has lacked investment.

The aim of the initiative is to help rural communities, schools, and health services as well as rural businesses.  With food and agri-business products contributing to two-thirds of New Zealand's export earnings, the benefits of improving rural broadband are expected to be significant.

New Zealand farms are increasingly high-tech in their approach and need access to high-tech services.  New Zealand leads the world in agri-business. The Rural Broadband Initiative is intended to help maintain and extend that lead.

Farmers will have access to enhanced DSL and fixed wireless through the mobile phone network which will give them initial peak speeds of at least 5Mbps (megabits per second) over wireless and up to 20 Mbps over copper.  The network is open access, so farmers and other rural users will also be able to connect to new fibre if it passes their property.

As the network is open access, farmers and other rural users will have a choice in retail service providers.  Open access also means that there are opportunities for businesses to become wholesale access seekers and provide tailored services to retail service providers.

The Rural Broadband Initiative means that farms will be able to showcase their products to markets, access support websites, do their banking online and get business updates.  They will be able use the technology for environmental monitoring such as effluent and water control as well as to access urban services such as shopping.  Our farms will have improved voice services too.

Chorus and Vodafone have won the tender to roll out the programme which is expected to begin mid-year.

Across the country, the initiative will bring high speed broadband to 252,000 customers, and 86 percent of rural houses and businesses will have access to broadband peak speeds of at least 5Mbps.  About 20 per cent of rural homes and businesses at present have access to 5Mbps at present.

The extension of the ultra-fast fibre backbone into rural areas means more customers living on the fibre routes may be able to get fibre to the door.

Chorus is also extending their existing fibre network by approximately 3,100 km.  There will be an additional 6,200 square kilometres of mobile coverage.

Some of the most remote schools in New Zealand, as well as rural hospitals and libraries, will also receive faster broadband connections through the Rural Broadband Initiative.

183 rural public libraries, 37 rural hospital, and 10 health centres will receive fibre connections.

Most rural schools are going to have access to ultra-fast broadband speeds of 100Mbps with 1035 rural schools connecting directly to fibre networks, and 57 schools having point to point wireless connections capable of speeds of 10Mps or more.