Doctors use broadband to send x-ray images for specialist assessment. Herald picture / Martin Sykes

Doctors use broadband to send x-ray images for specialist assessment. Herald picture / Martin Sykes

The axe is poised to fall on Telecom. After the company announced on Thursday that it had missed high-speed internet customer targets, regulation that will break up its broadband monopoly is looking increasingly likely.

Communications Minister David Cunliffe says a regulatory review should be completed by the middle of the year, and he has strongly signalled that the status quo is not an option.

That's because broadband, a fancy term for fast internet, is no longer a topic for geek magazines or newspapers' tech pages - it's gone mainstream.

Cunliffe's post-election promotion to Cabinet and added post as Associate Minister of Economic Development seem proof enough of its new importance to the broad economy.

Broadband is a technology whose wider economic and social benefits are just starting to be understood in countries far ahead of ours in adopting it. It's transforming and enabling business in previously unimagined ways.

It's also a technology that New Zealand is well behind in picking up, which means that few of those benefits are being realised here.

Not only are we behind, Cunliffe says, we're in very real danger of getting left behind.

But why is broadband so important?

Tim Jones has been selling cherries out of the tiny central Otago town of Cromwell since 1984. Back then his company was known as Molyneux but, about seven years ago, Jones started selling fruit through mail-order catalogues and changed the name to the more descriptive, Orchard Fresh.

Now, the company is blazing new trails - for the past three years, it has been selling goods direct on its website, www.orchardfresh.co.nz. The company started with fruit, but added wine as central Otago gained cachet for its vintages.

About 15 per cent of Orchard Fresh's sales are made online, Jones says, which translates into almost four tonnes of cherries alone shipped to customers directly.

While the online portion is small, it is growing rapidly, he says.

"It's something we're really keen to build on. It's the way of the future."

Jones says adopting broadband has allowed him to cut significant costs out of the business, in office paperwork, shipping and marketing. By cutting out middlemen distributors, Orchard Fresh saves about 35c a kilogram in shipping and 10 per cent on the sales price of goods. Those savings are passed on to consumers, who thus get their fruit cheaper than in grocery stores, he says.