Harre: End 'digital darkness'

Internet Party leader Laila Harre said the rest of Northland has effectively been left in a "digital darkness' with poor mobile reception and internet access.

Extending broadband internet access to all provincial areas and halving the cost of the service will help Northland's economic growth and is one of the Internet Party's main planks, Party Leader Laila Harre says.

Ms Harre was in Northland last week as part of the Internet Mana road trip with Mana Party Leader Hone Harawira, Internet Party founder Kim Dotcom and the Internet Party's Whangarei candidate David Curran.

The road trip had packed houses in Kaitaia, Kerikeri, Kaikohe and Whangarei, with well over 300 people at Whangarei Intermediate on Friday night to hear what the Internet Mana alliance stood for and what it would do for Northland.

Ahead of the Whangarei meeting Ms Harre visited the Whangarei branch of Literacy Aotearoa to explain her party's policy.

Whangarei was trumpeted as the first ultra fast broadband city in New Zealand in May when UFB lines were laid throughout the wider city area.

But Ms Harre said the rest of Northland has effectively been left in a "digital darkness' with poor mobile reception and internet access.

"I was in the middle of Kaikohe (the previous day) and here's a major town in Northland, but I couldn't get cellphone coverage, let alone internet access. And it gets worse the further north you go," she said.

She said increasing access to broadband - through fibre, satellite and copper connections - and halving the cost of the internet, would help Northland progress and allow high tech industries to move here. Internet Mana will push for construction of an additional fibre optic cable connecting New Zealand to Australia and the United States to end a bandwidth monopoly that Ms Harre says is hitting people hard in the pocket and stifling innovation.

She was also critical of the government's UFB rollout saying broadband speeds would still be far behind others in the West.

The speeds of NZ UFB would be 10Gb per second whereas the rest of the developed world already had those speeds and had set a standard of 100Gb.

"South Korea is going through an upgrade to take them to 100Gb in five years ... we'll still be so far behind."