Buller Electricity takes wireless lead

By RICHARD WOOD

Westport-based Buller Electricity has 40 commercial customers in its home town of Westport using 11Mbps high-speed wireless internet circuits and now plans to expand its network across the South Island.

The company has also confirmed it has responded to Fonterra's request for proposals for rural internet.

"A lot of people are talking about wireless. But we have it up and running," said CEO Mike McSherry.

Buller Electricity is now asking other power company and wireless operators in Timaru, Dunedin, Invercargill, Queenstown, and Nelson to join it and establish a larger base.

"We're trying to pull all those together under the one hat, and then we're going to expand down the West Coast through Greymouth and Hokitika," McSherry said. "If you can get as much traffic into one pipe as you can, particularly for international traffic, then your costs come down."

Another technology the company is trying is power line carrier (PLC), which sends data down power lines. This is now considered to be ready for practical application in urban areas, and the company is proceeding with its first implementation.

Buller Electricity's current wireless internet users include Westport High School, the local newspaper, surveyors, lawyers, accountants and other small businesses.

There are no home users yet but businesses will soon have home access added. It will operate at home for them as if they were on their office local area network.

The wireless network covers the whole town and extends to a radius of around 15km.

The company charges an installation fee of $250, then $136 plus GST per month. This gives customers 0.5 gigabytes a month of data and a guaranteed 256Kbps connection that can be faster depending on network load.

Extra megabytes over the cap are charged at 26c a megabyte.

Separate control boxes provided by Nelson-based e-services act as intelligent controllers for billing and provide pay-per-use applications such as virus protection and data back-up.

McSherry said the network could be upgraded from 11Mbps to 56Mbps just by changing some cards.

"The technology for speed is coming out quicker than we can handle it, really."

Elsewhere in the South Island Dunedin-based Delta is another power firm commercially offering wireless as part of a digital broadband service.

IT manager Lindsay McLennan said Delta's offering was only at the pilot stage but he envisaged it allowing access to niche markets, especially to rural areas.

Delta said it would launch in Queenstown this year, with other regional centres to follow.