KEY POINTS:
From his humble home in Parakai, north of Auckland, Regan Cunliffe is doing his best to build an international television empire.
Well, a television website empire, in any case. Together with his wife Rachel and four other employees, he is pioneering TV listings for the 21st century, with thriving websites in five countries devoted to TV gossip.
Each month, 300,000 people visit www.throng.co.nz, or its sister sites in Australia, Canada, Britain and Japan, making it a potentially lucrative medium for advertisers.
But New Zealand's slow and frustratingly expensive broadband service doesn't exactly make Cunliffe's life easy (no, he's not related to David).
While faster speeds would enable him to significantly improve the sites' content, including streaming video, in the meantime he would be happy to just pay a little less and not have to put up with restrictive data caps. "Compared with what people get overseas, where you can get `all you can eat' plans for next to nothing, it's ridiculous," he says.
Which is rather ironic, given all the talk about developing a knowledge economy and establishing "weightless" businesses to overcome the tyranny of our distance from major world markets.
Yet until recently many people have remained sceptical about whether spending $3-$5 billion on a fibre network would be money well spent.
Some industry figures have been brave enough to question just what we will all use high-speed broadband for - and why we need 80 per cent coverage, when only 70 per cent of households own a computer.
And then there are the really courageous souls, like British academic Richard Barbrook, who argues in his latest book Imaginary Futures -- From Thinking Machines to the Global Village that we have been duped to believe that technology will deliver us a better future when, in fact, it is simple inventions such as soap, contraceptives and antibiotics that have truly improved our lives.
As "Mike" recently commented on IT entrepreneur Rod Drury's personal blog: "If John Key really wants to spend $1.5 billion on competitiveness, let's put it into education and research, both things that have suffered massive cutbacks over the last few years ... In short, to really profit in a knowledge economy, you need the knowledge, not just the way to get it to people."
But according to those who are convinced life won't be worth living without high-speed broadband, part of the problem is what is known as Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system. In other words, a network is a whole lot more useful when it connects thousands or millions of people, than when it connects just a handful.
In a detailed report this year, the New Zealand Institute estimated the economic benefits could be in the order of $2.7 billion to $4.4 billion a year, including reduced travel costs, increased sales productivity, better productivity for digital media, capturing a slice of the market for storing and manipulating data, savings through remote working, savings in healthcare, and improved delivery of education.
Sydney-based telecoms analyst Paul Budde is one of those who is convinced fibre networks are the roads and railways of the 21st century.
Budde has witnessed first-hand what some countries are already doing with the technology. But even he concedes we are only at the early stages of discovering its potential.
"If it was just for a bit of porn, a bit of YouTube and a bit of Skype, you wouldn't say the Government has to be involved in that, but I don't think you'd find any Health, Education or Energy Minister that would argue against it."
National MP Maurice Williamson sees fast broadband as an essential tool for the nascent film and graphics industry, and to encourage more people to work from home.
"I would hope the Greens would be hugely supportive of this policy because this could be one of our biggest contributions to a reduction in greenhouse gases if we could actually have people not flying on aeroplanes, and driving into the office."
He notes the amount of terabytes used by XBox 360 in January alone was greater than that used by the entire US internet just six years ago. "It's just exploding and the way you will do business and the way you will transact in the economy in the future will all change, in my view, dramatically."
And Navman general manager John Blakey needs little convincing that it's not so much a case of "build it and they will come", but "if you don't build it, they won't come".
"It's an enormous challenge for us to hire and because a lot of our hiring at the moment is getting people from overseas, it is reasonably important not to look like a shoe-string garage operation," he says.
While Navman's head office in Northcote enjoys speeds of 10Mbps, thanks to Vector's fibre network, at Blakey's home in Mairangi Bay speeds are more like 2Mbps - and that's download only.
"I can do email and bits and pieces but I can't really do anything else ... As a company, for productivity, we would probably see greater benefits out of high-speed fibre if it turned up at a lot of our staff's homes for a reasonable price."
Budde agrees. "The people who want to move to places like New Zealand are doing it for lifestyle reasons and because they can afford to. These are the people who demand fast broadband. If you don't have good broadband, they simply won't come."
In the fibre
Fibre networks are being seen as the roads and railways of the 21st century. Some countries are using the technology for:
* Online education.
* Remote diagnostic health services.
* Smart monitoring of electricity grids.
* Entertainment such as television, gambling and gaming.
