What better roads were to rural communities last century, telecommunications should be in this one. But, worryingly, the signals are decidedly dodgy.
Paved roads and better vehicles gave farmers and other rural dwellers the ability to travel further faster and have greater choice in the businesses and services they patronised.
Easier travel also offset difficulties caused by the steady reduction of more local facilities from playcentres to post offices even as it contributed to their demise.
Of more use than tarseal to people in a sparsely populated countryside is a telecommunications service which links them to the world.
Computers and the internet, along with the advance of telephone services, offer even more promise to rural people than urban counterparts who may have the option of going into a shop as well as phoning it or visiting its website.
Rural people have shown that they appreciate this by hooking up to the internet at a greater rate than their city cousins.
A Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry study found that 61 per cent had computers and 80 per cent of computer owners had internet access. This gave an internet adoption rate of almost 50 per cent - higher than in cities.
Yet increasingly, the term "digital divide" - coined to describe people who cannot participate in the new technology because they are disadvantaged by lack of wealth or education - is being applied to a gap between urban and rural groups. It exists because of the poor state of the telecommunications infrastructure - dodgy telephone lines and insufficient cellphone coverage.
More than half the people in the survey had trouble just using the telephone, including the emergency 111 service. Nearly 70 per cent bemoaned the slow speed of internet access and three-quarters had problems with cellphone coverage.
Solutions are on the way but, MAF says, not quickly enough. Two-way satellite connections for the internet are not expected until between 2002 and 2004, and costs are initially expected to be high. Broadband wireless will provide high-speed internet access but not for up to five years. Signal quality may still be a problem.
Affordable satellite solutions for cellphones may be five years away.
All this at a time when farmers are increasingly acting to shorten the supply chain between them and their markets, and looking to new technology to help bridge the gap between their farms and customers who are often on the other side of the world.
There is also rapid development of on-line services targeting farmers with everything from their own farm production data, the latest research findings and weather updates to virtual supply stores where they can buy overalls to fertiliser.
New Zealand needs to make the investment to ensure that country folk can travel as swiftly along the internet super highway, as they have along the tarsealed one.
<i>Between the lines:</i> Rural communities suffer on the wrong side of a 'digital divide'
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