Chris Barton: Switched on but not making the connection

Sitting in a valley bordered by the Bombay Hills to the southwest and the Hunua Ranges to the north, Ararimu School is a 15-minute drive from Papakura and from Pukekohe. It's what you might call a semi-rural setting just 40km from the centre of New Zealand's largest city.

But it can't get broadband. Which is a shame because the school wants to participate in the information age.

Ararimu knows about the wealth of resource materials available on the net - web research, distance learning, videoconferencing and a whole lot more online educational opportunities. When it comes to internet protocol, Ararimu is switched on.

The school vision is "Developing Entrepreneurs of the Future" which is an advanced, if out-there, sort of vision for a New Zealand primary school.

But it can't get broadband. It does have a telephone and a fax and manages its email and website via the slow lane its ancient copper wire provides. Which is frustrating because Ararimu knows about fibre.

That's just 6 kilometres away along the southern corridor, where every telecommunications carrier you can think of has cables of the stuff. But like the motorway traffic, it just passes Ararimu by. So near and yet so far.

Ararimu is not alone. Not far to the west of Pukekohe, on Glenbrook Beach Rd, is the tranquil subtropical oasis, complete with three lakes, that is Gardenza Gardens and Nursery.

The business specialises in exotic flowering bulbous plants including amaryllids such as Clivia, the fireball lily from South Africa and the "South American wild delights" of the species Hippeastrum.

It can't get broadband and though it's been trying to get into the fast lane for years, Gardenza seems consigned for eternity to Telecom's slow trickle dial-up service. Gardenza too is frustrated because it knows how much the web can help it sell plants.

It does the best it can, fulfilling web orders for courier delivery, but with dial-up, it's a slow, arduous, time-consuming process just maintaining a basic website.

It is frustrating also, because fibre is nearby but no one wants to connect them. Gardenza can only dream about how much more productive its business could be with broadband and how much easier it would be to expand, to market and to develop other trading options. So near and yet so far.

It seems churlish to rain on the Government's "Broadband Investment Initiative" parade - especially because it's such a visionary plan to re-wire New Zealand's antiquated telecommunications infrastructure. But if it's not going to service schools such as Ararimu and businesses such as Gardenza - which at the moment it's not - then you wonder whether this plan has been properly thought through.

How is it that the Government is planning to spend $1.5 billion over 10 years laying fibre to premises that may not even want broadband but isn't doing a thing for Ararimu and Gardenza, which are desperate for it right now?

While Pukekohe is on the map for Minister for Communications and Information Technology Steven Joyce's broadband investment, areas including Ararimu's and Gardenza's, even though they are part of the new Auckland Super City, are not. These places are not the back of beyond, they're about an hour's drive from the CBD and they're still on dial-up. A city that's not fully wired can hardly call itself super.

While Joyce has earmarked $48 million to deal with "rural" broadband and has yet to release details, it's a paltry sum for such a big problem. In the meantime the investment's concentration on urban areas - to reach 75 per cent of premises - is creating a digital divide.

On paper, it sounds reasonable - invest where most of the people are because that will give the return on investment. But when it comes to network economics, it's wrong. Investment should be concentrated first at the periphery, the most hard-to-reach places, the locations isolated by distance and geography that would benefit most by being connected.

In other words, do the difficult stuff first, build from the impoverished outer and the inner, which already has abundant fibre, will follow. The true measure of a network is in how good its most distant connection is.

But what's also at stake here is a public utility that has yet to realise its prime purpose - to provide utility to the public. That means everybody. The current plan creates a digital disadvantage to businesses like Gardenza and schools like Ararimu, not to mention farmers.

Joyce is calling for submissions on his draft investment proposal. Let's hope he can remould his grand ambition to rewire New Zealand to accommodate those missing out - so that everyone, especially those so near to fibre, but so far from receiving its benefits, can reach the fast lane.

chris.barton@nzherald.co.nz