"This is a once in a 40 or 50-year change. We are going from copper, which has served us very well since the days of Alexander Graham Bell and transitioning after all of that time to fibre.
"Around the world people are looking at the New Zealand rollout and saying that we are doing it right. We are doing fibre to the home and fibre to the cabinet, which the whole world is saying is the gold standard of this core infrastructure."
The RBI programme is now essentially two thirds of the way through, well ahead of the 2016 end target set when the rollout began in 2011. With $350 million of taxpayer investment funding the initiative, any time and efficiency savings are in everybody's best interests.
Chorus and Vodafone were jointly awarded the tender to roll out the service. Chorus' existing fibre network will be expanded with 3350km of fibre being laid to service 1000 new broadband cabinets and 154 new Vodafone cell sites.
"This is the type of technology that you can't understand how valuable they are and the impact they can have until you are using them. Think back to the days before everyone had cellphones: when you don't have one you can't see why you would need one. Then you have one and you can't imagine life without it. I think that is how people will find these new connection speeds," says Adams.
"Over the course of the programme, 90 per cent of people who live outside the Ultra Fast Broadband areas will be getting fibre to their homes." Those homes which fall outside the RBI will instead receive an enhanced wireless service delivering a download speed of at least 5 megabits per second.
"What that really means is that there is enough speed coming through for the first time and it can start to be used as a serious business tool.
"The RBI has the ability to transform the connectivity of rural New Zealand and have a staggering impact on the way businesses operate.
"You simply can look at the straight time-saving of being able to do some things on a real-time basis on the go.
"Some of the changes which we really see for rural business is the ability to do what many people in the city have taken for granted for a long time.
"Easy connectivity to your bankers, lawyers, accountants and consultants. The time-savings in that alone are absolutely staggering, particularly if you're going from the basis of very little connectivity, which a lot of our rural communities currently do have."
Beyond the benefits people in urban communities have become accustomed to, specialist agricultural software and technology is emerging which could revolutionise the industry as a whole. More traditional management technologies are seeing greater penetration in the sector, while highly specialised innovations around precision farming and real-time monitoring are becoming more prevalent.
"These technologies will really help paint a comprehensive picture of what is going on across the farm in terms of production, animal welfare and environmental footprint. This obviously allows for much better management overall and opens the door in the future for some really exciting paths for consumers to track their food right back to the paddock in New Zealand."
Though improvements in efficiency can easily be measured in dollar terms, intangible benefits of the programme will be felt in communities for generations, says Adams. The education and health sectors stand to benefit, with 1000 rural schools and 50 rural hospitals to receive fibre under the programme.
"It certainly helps attract workers on to the farm when they can feel more connected back to the rest of the world. If you can make sure the workers and farmers and communities are connected with the internet more generally in their lives, then it will be a very important factor for them. I think it is absolutely critical for the future of rural and provincial New Zealand."
Despite a relatively high unemployment rate, the agricultural sector remains understaffed, as difficulties in attracting the next generation of young New Zealand farm workers takes its toll. If increased access to the outside world and the opportunities which the internet facilitates makes agriculture more attractive, that's a big win for New Zealand, says Adams.
"The connectivity itself is not the important thing, it is what people then do with it. We see the benefits certainly coming within business in terms of productivity, but it goes further than that. We've seen that people today can run their businesses from anywhere in the world. It may not be traditional agribusinesses. It could be people living in the most remote corner of New Zealand developing apps for the app stores or feeding into some global business on the other side of the world."
"I'm in no doubt that people will look back, especially in rural and provincial New Zealand 10 years from now and will wonder how we ever dealt without this type of connectivity."
