Woosh big hit in Tuatapere

Tuatapere residents at the Woosh Wireless launch say they are already seeing the benefits of broadband.

Trish King runs Western Southland Milkies with husband Alistair, delivering milk and chilled food to 500 customers from Oreti River to Blackmount Hill.

She says that after five years on dial-up, the Woosh beta trial has been a revelation. For a start, there is the familiar rural problem of electric fences interfering with telephone lines.

"We had very noisy lines from the house to the road. Broadband takes that problem away," she said.

Like most Mainland distributors, the Kings use EasyVend software from Jeal Computer Systems in Sydney, which requires regular updates.

"Under the old system it would take three or four hours, if the line did not cut off first. Now it takes seven to 10 minutes," King said.

"We can also now email invoices to customers, which we couldn't do before, and we do all our banking on the net."

King said that as Woosh came into service across Southland the business would be able to take advantage of Jeal's new MiniVend module, which allowed drivers to enter deliveries and receipts into a Palm device.

"It means I won't have to wait for the trucks to come back to do orders and stocktake.

"All that information can be sent through while they are still on the road," she said.

For Sandra Bakker-Martin, who moved to Tuatapere from Auckland two years ago when her husband was transferred to the local police station, Woosh makes her home-based translation service much easier to run.

"Most of my work is localising software for Dutch firms, which means I have to download big databases," Bakker-Martin said.

"It used to take up to two hours."

Garage owner Donald Egerton has one major gripe against Woosh: "I can't use it at work, because the Land Transport Safety Authority won't allow connections through anything but Telecom Xtra.

"But it works brilliantly at home."