NZ Gov't gives rural broadband plan the green light

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 16 March 2010 10:54

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

The New Zealand government has finalised its plans for rural telecommunications with Cabinet signing off on plans to rollout high speed broadband in rural areas, and for the reform of the Telecommunications Service Obligations (TSO).

Communications and information technology minister, Steven Joyce, said: "As a result of this plan we are confirming today, 97 percent of [rural] households will have access to broadband services of at least 5Mbps with the remainder reaching at least 1Mbps. For many remote and not-so-remote rural areas this will be light years ahead of where they are today."

A big part of the plan will be connecting fibre directly to rural schools. "The government's rural broadband initiative will help deliver fibre connections [delivering at least 100Mbps] to 97 percent of schools across the country and 99.7 percent of students," Joyce said. "The remaining most remote schools will achieve speeds of at least 10Mbps."

The final plans for rural broadband and TSO reform follow release in September of separate discussion papers on rural broadband and TSO reform. Sixty seven submissions were received on the rural broadband proposal. Joyce said that the only significant change to the rural broadband initiative had been to up-weight the importance of the community connection objectives, relative to the schools part of the initiative.

"Some submitters were concerned that too much emphasis was being placed on school connectivity relative to the rest of the community. We have changed that in the final plan to be clear that while the schools will be the original catalyst to get fibre to the community; achieving at least 5Mbps across the communities is the primary aim of the exercise." The original plans was for 80 percent of rural households to get at least 5Mbps. In the final plan that figure is 97 percent.

The rural broadband initiative is expected to cost around $NZ300million, and it is being funded by a $NZ48 million direct government grant, plus $NZ252 million from a new telecommunications development levy being set up as part of the accompanying TSO reforms, which were also confirmed by cabinet on March 15.

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