Farmers connect with Kiwi ingenuity

Lachlan Chapman wants to put fibre-optic cable on his Pukekohe farm to take advantage of technology. Photo / Richard Robinson

For Ken Marshall, it was because he wanted to give his partner the best birthday present. Warren McNabb needed it to run his vineyard and home office. Liz Udy wanted to become a midwife. And Richard Wilson's high-tech milking shed wouldn't work without it.

They're all talking about requiring fast broadband. Yet all these farmers were in places - Hastwell, Mangamaire, the Awatere Valley and Hinds - that made the prospect as remote as their location.

Extraordinary, then, that they all now enjoy fibre-optic cable to their doors and unimaginable broadband speeds - 100 megabits per second (Mbps) - that townies can only dream of. The national average is around 3Mbps.

So how can farms at the farthest reaches of the network be surfing the net potentially 33 times faster? Call it Kiwi ingenuity, Number 8 wire mentality or pioneering spirit. Farmers, not normally at the forefront of geekdom, are doing it for themselves - trenching fibre from the farmhouse across their paddocks to the nearest fibre trunk, and leading the way in the rewiring of New Zealand.

An hour's drive south of Auckland, Lachlan Chapman can't get broadband from Telecom. As an interim solution he's set up an expensive wireless link from the Bombay Hills. But Chapman longs for the day he can connect the family's Pukekohe potato and onion farm with its other farms in Waikato and Hawkes Bay. The third-generation grower is talking about a seamless network that offers not just voice and data communications, but also monitors and sets coolstore temperatures along with handling the farms' trucking logistics.

Opto Network's Roger De Salis is at Pukekohe to show Chapman and the Herald just how easy it can be.

Unwinding an end of blue wire from a cable drum, he feeds it into a pipe-layer attached to the back of the tractor. Chapman sets the mole plough depth and drives the tractor forward, creating a neat furrow and sinking the cable a metre underground in the process.

Done. Well, not quite. To make it work De Salis needs about 10 surrounding farms to do the same. He'll then liaise with local lines company, Counties Power, to extend its existing fibre-optic network a couple of extra kilometres to a point where he can hook everyone up. In the process, he's hoping to bring broadband to the local school. The result: community-owned access. Each farmer has property rights to the fibre on their land and provides an easement - for data - to cross over to the neighbour.

It's how Marshall, who lives in the old Post Office building at Hastwell, near Eketahuna, was able to give his partner Janet a fabulous birthday present. Marshall, a naval reserve officer running a Finnish Landrace sheep farm, says the idea emerged from a discussion with De Salis at the Trentham Officers Mess in 2008.

"Janet was doing a masters at Otago Medical School and it was absolutely hopeless for her on dial-up over the old copper lines," he recalls. "She would get on to some information from a university website and it would drop off halfway through. Telecom said it was going to be years before we would get broadband."

De Salis then hatched his community access idea - convincing Marshall and eight neighbouring farms to plough in about five kilometres of cable to connect to FX Networks' fibre backbone. For the farmers, it didn't seem that complicated - laying fibre wasn't that different from laying irrigation pipe.

De Salis is the founder of FX Networks, a key player in this story. It's a network that has its beginning in fibre-optic cable laid many years ago by the then New Zealand Railways. Somehow De Salis managed to get access to that old fibre, and, more importantly, strike a deal with what became TranzRail to continue laying the stuff along the railway tracks. Thanks to overseas investors and De Salis's doggedness, the independent fibre network now extends from Auckland to Christchurch and quite a few other places as well.

"We're a small village in the middle country and we have the fastest stuff around," says Marshall. "Janet's as happy as anything. When she sends off an assignment it shoots away. It opened up the world for her." There have been a few other changes too. Marshall no longer has a Telecom phone line. "I'm talking on the fibre-optic phone at the moment," he tells us. He's also discovered how fast he can do his monthly GST return online - although he can't quite bring himself to do online bill payment. "I still write out the old-fashioned cheques. I like to see that in front of me. But I guess, over time, it will go the electronic way."

De Salis is no longer involved with FX Networks, although he's still a shareholder. The Johnny Appleseed of high-speed broadband now traverses the country sowing his low-cost fibre message. Ultimately, he'd like to see some 900 rural schools become fibre exchanges - essentially a rack of high-tech transmission equipment in a cupboard - providing an access point for the surrounding community.

"I do thousands of kilometres a year tramping around this country, building fibre networks," he says. "Why am I doing it? Why not? Because I passionately believe that a large-scale broadband network that is open-access and very low cost will make an economic difference to this country."

Another location where the prospect of broadband seemed a pipe dream was the Awatere Valley south of Blenheim, which extends into South Island high country stations. Once again FX Networks was involved at the time, extending its network. At a particularly difficult part of the cable route, several framers offered an easier alternative - running it across their land. In exchange for their generosity Opto Network combined with Network Tasman in a bold plan that saw about 30 farmers dig in about 10km of cable and connect up around 40 houses.

One was Warren McNabb at Altimarloch, a 235ha property with 125ha of mainly sauvignon blanc grapes. He paid about $2000 and ploughed in 800m of cable to connect his house and a cottage."I saw it as an improvement for the property. It was too good an opportunity to pass up," he says. Prior to that, McNabb, who is also a partner in a distributed wind farm development company, struggled with patchy satellite-based access to run his businesses. And now? "It's lightning. It works as a giant party line. If power goes out below us we lose signal. If it's above us we're fine. I think we had a rat eat one of the cables at someone's house once. And once somebody pulled the plug out of the equipment at their house to plug in a vacuum cleaner. Other than that, it's been very reliable." McNabb pays $50 a month for unlimited access. With phone services it's $100 a month.

De Salis is not alone in building fibre networks for the community. James Watts of Inspire Net has laid about 220km of fibre between Woodville, Pahiatua, Eketahuna, and Palmerston North. When Liz and Craig Udy learned the fibre ran along Mangamaire Rd bordering their beef farm, they jumped at the chance to connect. "We were on an old exchange and Telecom said they weren't going to upgrade it, so we were stuck on dial-up," says Udy, who had started training to be a midwife and needed access to Massey University's web-based coursework, and to research online.

The connection was made by ploughing in 300m of ducting with the fibre then "blown" down the duct with a "Tornado" machine which pressurises the pipe. Watts used the farmshed to house transmission equipment and linked it to a wireless transmitter on a hill above the farm which provides wireless internet access to others in the district. He also connected several schools in the area to fibre, including Mangamaire where the local community dug the last 80m with shovels over a weekend.

Inspire Net charges around $100 per month for 100Mbps access.

Richard Wilson's dairy shed near Hinds, south of Ashburton, is very high-tech and gives lie to the idea that broadband doesn't do anything to help increase the production of butterfat. As a cow steps on to the rotary platform, Protrack software detects her electronic identification tag.

And the farmer can see instantly everything about the cow's pedigree and milk production history. It helps in knowing when her milk needs to be withheld - such as during an antibiotic withholding period. Or when her milk is high in colostrum after calving - both decisions that could potentially cost thousands of dollars if you get it wrong. The system also needs a reliable data connection to synchronise data to the Livestock Roger De Salis (above), managing director of Opto Network, travels the country, sowing his fibre-optic seeds. Dairy farmer Richard Wilson says, "To me it's a bit like going from a shingle road to a tarseal road."

When Wilson learned Electricity Ashburton was laying fibre nearby, he was one of the first to volunteer to be part of their broadband trial. By Christmas, Electricity Ashburton will have 333km of fibre in the ground. It now has 21 mostly rural connections running in pilot mode at 10Mbps, which will boost to 100Mbps when the system goes live.

"To me it's a bit like going from a shingle road to a tarseal road," says Wilson. "It's a step forward which becomes the norm."

If you look at a broadband map of New Zealand, the companies with the most fibre are Telecom and TelstraClear. Yet it's the smaller players, like Opto Network, Inspire Net and Electricity Ashburton that are actually running fibre to consumers' doors. There's no easy explanation for this state of affairs.

One is because while the telecommunication companies do have a lot of fibre, most of it is already committed to their existing businesses. And, in Telecom's case, it's fibre that joins into copper over the "last mile" to our homes - thereby constricting what bandwidth is possible.

It's also because the fibre-only companies - unencumbered by decades of legacy infrastructure - can move much more quickly with the latest low-cost technology.

With $1.8 billion of Government money on the table to advance the rollout of fast broadband, many are clamouring for a slice of the action. What's also clear is that farmers, for too long denied decent telecommunications services, aren't waiting.

See an interesting interactive map of New Zealand's current broadband landscape here.

10 WAYS THEY'RE WORKING FASTER ON FARMS

ONE: INTERNET BANKING
Inadequate over dial-up and many rural copper connections.

TWO: STUDY COURSES
Around 20 per cent now using online learning with a tertiary institution.

THREE: SKYPING THE KIDS
Around 50 per cent wanted fast connections to make video calls to their children living overseas or elsewhere in New Zealand.

FOUR: QUICK FARM WEBSITE ACCESS
E.g, the stock agent, Fonterra, the wool clip, weather forecasts.

FIVE: COMMERCE ONLINE
Rural transactions for milk, beef and transport conducted online.

SIX: GOOGLE EARTH
Aerial views of the farm, providing a farm management tool.

SEVEN: RESEARCH
Downloading scientific papers and applications - e.g for specialised breeding information or viticulture technology.

EIGHT: ADDITIONAL BUSINESS
About 15 per cent of farms run remote businesses - e.g travel, bridal, mail-order, flowers, often requiring extra (voice over internet protocol) phone lines.

NINE: TIME SAVED
Doing the electronic chores of the day.

TEN: TRAVEL SAVED
E.g online banking or ordering, reducing the need to drive to town.

Source: informal survey from fibre installations by Opto Network