Swain: broadband net access is key

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Information Technology Minister Paul Swain is convinced every New Zealander needs fast and reliable internet access in the shape of a broadband connection.

What he is not so clear about is how this will be achieved or who will pay for it.

The Business Herald caught up with Mr Swain in Melbourne last week, shortly after his brief meeting with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who may have rekindled the minister's enthusiasm for broadband.

While Mr Swain reckons Mr Gates broadly endorsed the Government's position on a range of issues from e-government to anti-hacking legislation, he had expressed disappointment at the slow take up of broadband internet access in this part of the world.

"Everyone acknowledges that broadband is the key, particularly for a country like New Zealand with its geography," says Mr Swain.

"The problem of the lack of broadband round the country and the fact that in some parts e-mails are affected by electric fences is simply not good enough."

Mr Swain said he was not happy with the present level of broadband provision, and it was one of the issues being addressed by the Telecommunications Inquiry which will report to him as Minister of Communications this month.

Mr Swain said the "digital divide" was not only a rich and poor problem of access to information, but was a town and country issue as well.

The Government is considering pilot schemes to try different forms of technology, including optical fibre, satellite, digital TV and microwave.

But anyone expecting a Singaporean-style, Government-financed national provision of any one of these will be disappointed.

"We don't have that luxury. We've moved on from the days when the Government rolls out a whole pile of fibre itself."

Mr Swain said children in Ruatoria should have the same access to information as their counterparts in Wellington and Auckland.

But he believes the Government's role should be to encourage the introduction of commercial services by stimulating demand at grass roots level.

"It probably doesn't make commercial sense to have huge amounts of bandwidth running past every house, and we should start looking at what I call the community base - the school, the community centre, the marae - as a start.

"Then, if you add on top of that a hospital, medical centres, a whole pile of farms, potentially a freezing works and a range of small businesses, then you start to get a bit of a critical mass.

"There's going to have to be some commercial imperative here, as the Government's not going to be able to afford to roll all this out. Hopefully, with the demand going up, people will decide that on a miserable night they don't want to go to the marae or the community centre, and they will say: 'Why don't we get [broadband access] here?"'

But many say there is already plenty of demand for broadband access in rural areas and the problem lies in the fact that broadband technologies like digital subscriber line (DSL) must be enabled by Telecom at its exchanges.

While Telecom plans to DSL-enable between 50 and 70 more exchanges over the next 12 months, at present only 69 of its more than 500 exchanges are so equipped.

This means that around 1.2 million of Telecom's fixed line customers outside the main centres have no broadband option at all, other than the compromise of Ihug's one-way direct satellite service.

As to whether the solution might involve removing Telecom's monopoly of the "local loop," Mr Swain said: "Yes - well before I say that, what I will say is that is an option that I've asked the inquiry to look into. The draft report said that, on balance, unbundling the local loop was not critical."

Mr Swain said the position of the final report might differ, as many submissions had been received since the draft was published.

"There are pros and cons there ... some will say it is quite an expensive option and there are other ways of getting access to the loop via wholesaling.

"Others will say that until we do that we are not going to be able to drive proper competition.

"That's why we set the inquiry up."