Rural pilot schemes upset ihug

By RICHARD WOOD

Internet provider ihug says the Government is unfairly competing with its rural broadband services - and wants it to stop.

Ihug feels the Government's approach to broadband pilots and its stated goal of providing high-speed, two-way internet access by next year discriminate against its own high-speed satellite service, Ultra.

Ultra operates at up to 1 megabits a second (Mbps) for downloads, or receiving from the internet, but uses standard phone-line dial-up for "uploading", or sending to the internet.

Ihug says it can be used by every rural user in New Zealand.

Ihug representatives are to meet Communications Minister Paul Swain this month for discussions. Both parties claim to have initiated the meeting, which was meant to take place last month.

"I've seen ihug's comments. I'm wanting to talk to them and make sure they are engaged," said Swain.

Ihug brand manager Philip McIntosh said the Government was effectively subsidising competitors into a space in which ihug had invested heavily. Ihug had never been invited to tender for a pilot.

He said ihug's and the Government's own research showed that most farmers needed only one-way high-speed internet access like that available through Ultra.

Swain said the Government was technology agnostic, and satellite was one of the four options it was aware of for high-speed internet access. The others were ADSL, fibre optics and fixed wireless.

"In the end my view is it will be a mix and match of all those. No one is being excluded but no one is being promoted."

The Government was not in the business of subsidising any telecommunications or network companies, even its own BCL, owned by TVNZ.

Swain said the broadband pilot projects going on around the country were intended to gauge community demand. Competitive tenders would follow.

"A telecommunications company will not necessarily be interested in one farmer down one lonely road but may well be interested in service to 30,000 people in an area.

"I don't really care much about the technology. What we want is access, that is the critical point."

Where Swain does appear to exclude ihug is in his insistence that two-way internet is required for teleconferencing in rural schools and for farmers to send video and still images of farm animals and meat processing.

Ihug's McIntosh said two-way internet access was "a luxury that only an elitist group of users could truly benefit from and is also a solution that the vast majority of rural users could never afford".

He said an ihug email survey this year of 1500 rural users showed that while almost all would like a super-fast high-speed connection, the real need was for an internet service that could provide a connection speed comparable with dial-up speeds achieved in cities.

Few were willing to pay more than $30 a month for high speed.

McIntosh said changes in technology would make providing quality high-speed access in rural areas affordable in three to five years using technologies such as two-way satellite and long-range ADSL.

Investing heavily now in new and unproven technology would be extraordinarily expensive and could very easily prove disastrous when new and cheaper technology became available, he said.

Swain said his view was that broadband would take off exponentially.

"At the moment there are those visionaries who know what the future of these technologies is going to be, what it's going to mean for rural, provincial New Zealand, how it's going to be the new step forward, the same as the motorways, the highways, and powerlines."

He said the need for broadband now was primarily Government driven through Education Minister Trevor Mallard, who wanted this type of technology "yesterday".

"We are talking about cyber-classrooms.

"The ability for good high-quality, high resolution interactive videoconferencing is going to be the norm in schools.

"Education has been pushing this for some time. Videoconferencing is absolutely critical and fundamental.

"What is being piloted now is the ability for schools to be able to get access to a course being offered in real-time videoconference on that particular subject matter."

Swain said people in the towns and rural areas were the poor cousins who had been left behind, although they were the biggest contributors to GDP.