An ally in the hard-hit Canterbury region's ability to fight future natural disasters is coming from an unlikely source - ultra-fast fibre network.
A bank of powerful computers, all linked to 2degrees' high-speed fibre network, were set up in an emergency room during last month's Port Hill wildfires enabling fighters to quickly respond to the crisis.
Environment Canterbury (ECAN) - the region's air, water and land quality watchdog - set up the room as an emergency GIS (geographic information system) operation in co-ordination with civil defence, using aerial and satellite imagery to map the extent and progress of the fires.
For the first time in New Zealand, 2degrees brought fibre to the desk as part of a GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) installation for ECAN's state-of-the-art building in the Christchurch CBD, purpose built following the 2011 earthquake.
The office, which houses 450 employees, has been designed to be cleaner and greener than its predecessor. As part of its environmental design, ECAN opted to cable the building with fibre optic cable for its local area network (LAN) rather than copper.
ECAN's team leader ICT operations Alan Warne says the decision to go with fibre was made when they were planning their move into the new building and it has already paid dividends from a technical and cost point of view.
"There is a perception fibre is more expensive and difficult to use compared to the traditional copper-based networks," he says. "But we have found it is massively less and took one person six weeks to finish."
Warne says there are many advantages to fibre: it is easier and more straight-forward to install than copper; it requires less drilling through beams and walls and, unlike copper, runs alongside power cabling so separate cabling trays are not needed; a single fibre can carry the equivalent amount of data as several dozen copper cables.
With less impact on the environment, lower install costs, greater flexibility and the security of future proofing, the fibre-based network allows ECAN to grow and expand with future technologies as they become available. Fibre to the desk is common overseas but not in New Zealand.
The solution provided by 2degrees also includes wireless which will support ECAN's new paperless approach - allowing connectivity anywhere in the building.
Mark Petrie, 2degrees Chief Fixed Officer says it is pleased ECAN has been so future-focused and have seized the opportunity to try something innovative that offers so much benefit.
"Fibre to the desk is the way of future - not just for large corporates and existing buildings, but for all new buildings in New Zealand," he says. "We're proud to be one of the first to offer this innovative technology to our customers for a corporate LAN."
Warne says ECAN has found huge benefit in moving to fibre: "We have a lot of bandwidth-hungry applications, we use a lot of video conferencing and we needed a network capable of soaking up the increased bandwidth demand.
"The GIS work we do produces lots of images and data, it's a bit like maps on steroids. During the Port Hills fires we produced maps showing the extent of the damage, where people were, that sort of thing which helped in the response by emergency services."
He says since using fibre ECAN has had no problems with network speed, a crucial factor during crises like fires and earthquakes.
GIS is used extensively by the organisation in its regular environmental work measuring water flows and air and soil quality throughout the Canterbury region.
"All of this takes a fair chunk of band-width and before fibre we were intending to throttle the space available to some employees to ensure there was enough capacity for our GIS users. But we haven't had to do that and so far haven't even touched 10 per cent of network capacity."
Warne says a lot of IT people are scared of fibre seeing it as a different technology but in reality it is not difficult to handle. Since moving into the new building a year ago, Warne has given several guided tours to show the benefits of fibre to government organisations and private companies.
For the non-tech person he has a simple message: "They don't even notice anything has changed, they just get a faster network."
One of the main targets of the fibre roll-out are small businesses (SME's), a sector that although it stands to gain much from accessing the technology, often does not understand or is not aware of the benefits.