Connectivity & NZ Broadband status

I have been struggling with delivering an online course and the number of technical problems I encounter while trying to produce high quality content. One of the frequent comments from students and teachers is "but some people cannot have broadband - we cannot exclude them". The other comment is to keep content to a minumum because of connectivity problems even with broadband.

This puts my argument rather succinctly. thanks to MacDoctor


New Zealand is a very small country with a spread out population served by an oligopoly of business interests. We already pay well over the odds for a spotty cell phone service and an oversubscribed, slow broadband service. While our telcos are doing a fair amount of investment, they tend to concentrate on city centers, leaving 20-30% of the nation to fend for themselves. I live on a lifestyle property in Auckland that is very close to a large housing estate and yet, up until two years ago, I could not get broadband except via satellite link (a miserable experience!). Even now there are many areas in central Auckland where I can’t get a cell phone signal, let alone a 3G signal. I consider that an abject market failure.

* Consumers are hardly using the speeds and caps available now.

That is because they are too expensive, too restrictive and oversubscribed. I can’t get the maximum speed from my connection most of the time, because contention rates (the number of people on a single line) are too high. So saying that consumers are not using the speed available now is rather like someone taping your mouth up and then commenting that you are not eating enough. And a data cap of 1Gb is tantamount to saying “no downloading or else” - it actively discourages people from using their internet connections for anything more than e-mail and a bit of surfing. It is exactly this restrictive, controlling attitude of Telcos that the broadband policy is aimed at.

* Fibre to the home may prove to be the wrong technology, a Think Big-style white elephant.

This is the same argument as those who put off buying a new computer, because “something better will be along in a few months”. They wind up using ancient, time-wasting old technology out of fear that they won’t have “the latest stuff”. Put this mind-set into the Telco context and we will still be using copper wire while the first world is using quantum oscillation for data transfer.

* And home is where we consume things, not produce them, so the productivity-based arguments are rickety.

I have been struggling dealing with educational beauracrats about online learning. My thinking seems to be like bashing my head agamnist a wall. This article by blogger MacDoctor ? puts my thoughts rather succinctly.
This statement illustrates a serious lack of vision. As bandwidth increases, the number of uses that bandwidth can be put to increases, exponentially. For example, imagine sufficient bandwidth for a full virtual reality school where kids can be taught one-on-one by real teachers, or a VR mall that can be browsed just like the real thing (not the appalingly flat, lifeless attempts of our current constrained bandwidth). It is perfectly feasible that most of our work can be done from home - VR house calls anyone? The decrease in transport cost alone would pay for fibre to the home and there would be the added benefit of a decrease in carbon dioxide emissions. And those are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head.

We have been using the buzzwords “knowledge economy” for a decade, without any apparent understanding of what this actually means. Rapid exchange of information and ideas already means the difference between the survival and the demise of a business. Speed and versatility of data exchange will become ever more vital in the years to come. National should ignore all the naysayers for their own good.