MPs to get Jetstream link

By ADAM GIFFORD

The Parliamentary Service is offering MPs the Henry Ford option for getting broadband to their electorate offices - any service as long as it's Telecom's Jetstream.

Information and communications services manager John Preval said it had not even looked at other options such as wireless internet or fibre connections.

"This is the first step," he said. "We will look at other options when we have connected those offices which can get Jetstream.

"It gives us the option downstream to use the ip.remote and Safecom product offerings provided by Telecom to provide MPs with secure access to resources."

However, those products - essentially a virtual private network and an antivirus and security suite - are not part of the current deal.

Preval said the Parliamentary Service had "a reasonable deal" for the bulk Jetstream purchase, but would not give a price.

Like any large organisation, it preferred not to have to deal with multiple vendors, he said.

The Jetstream roll-out was considered to come into the ambit of last year's decision, arrived at after an open tender, to access all telecommunications services for MPs from Telecom or TelstraClear.

Even with a discount, each of the more than 120 offices will cost several hundred dollars to connect, once connection charges and equipment are taken into account.

Keith Davidson, general manager of the Wairarapa internet service provider Wise Net and president of InternetNZ, said his company already delivered a wireless service to the building housing Wairarapa MP Georgina Beyer's electorate office.

"She is an existing dial-up customer, and I suggested to Parliamentary Services they use the wireless service," Davidson said.

"They said wireless is too insecure."

He said that rather than explain the security of properly configured wireless internet networks, "I gave up at that point".

Preval denied that anyone in his office would have made that statement.

Davidson said Beyer chose to stay with her local internet provider, which resells Jetstream, but other MPs might have taken the default option and switched to Telecom's Xtra subsidiary.

"It's similar to what happened several years ago when the Land Transport Safety Authority insisted all garages issuing warrants of fitness had to go on Xtra to be on the LTSA's virtual private network," Davidson said.

"That cost us and a lot of other ISPs around the country business, not only from ISP services but we were also supplying them computer equipment."

Endorsing copper-based internet access technology, which many commentators were now calling "half fast" rather than high speed, seemed at odds with the rhetoric about a knowledge economy.

Parliament's techno-buff, Pakuranga MP Maurice Williamson, said he signed on to Jetstream when it came on the market almost three years ago.

"We are on the 600MB plan, and we use very close to that every month," he said.

"Email now accounts for the vast bulk of communications with constituents, so I am amazed there are still some MPs without email.

"It is good Parliamentary Services is picking up the cost of providing access, but there should be an open market.

"If the decision is for MPs to be given access to broadband, they should be given a budget of say $70 a month and told, 'You can redeem this with any broadband supplier'."