Bigger than it seems

Victoria Crone of Chorus.

Because the ultrafast broadband (UFB) network build is spread out over the entire country, it doesn't have the look and feel of a major engineering operation, but as Downer UFB and RBI project director Mike Maunsell says, it's much bigger than it appears to be.

Chorus alone will spend in the region of $200 to $300 million a year on engineering for around eight years as it rolls out the UFB network. This year the company, or rather its engineering contractors, will install 360 new fibre roadside cabinets. The pattern will be much the same for the next six years.

Maunsell says when Chorus first won the contract to build the lion's share of the UFB network there was much talk that the project would be a rerun of the fibre-to-the-node network Chorus had to build following the 2006 amendments to the 2001 Telecommunications Act.

That project delivered fast ADSL broadband to roadside cabinets that then delivered services to homes over the copper network.

The fibre-to-the-node network rolled out like clockwork. Things haven't been so easy with UFB. Apart from anything else, the job is on a bigger scale - even bigger than was anticipated when Chorus won the bidding. It involves backhaul from a telephone exchange to each cabinet, then there's fibre ducting to 200 or so homes per cabinet.

The job requires new skills and tools. Maunsell says neither were common in New Zealand when the project started. "Directional drills are a key resource, they need experienced operators. It's not a job you can just give someone and hope they get on with it. It takes a couple of years to get to the experience level needed to use the drill. We had to bring people into the country to use them".

He also says there weren't enough directional drills in New Zealand when the project started, nor were there enough people with fibre joining skills. "Like any engineering project it's about getting the right people, processes and technology, that takes time," he says.

After those teething troubles, Maunsell says the engineering is starting to accelerate.

"We have systems in place, it becomes like a production line. If you don't line things up well it can quickly become a train wreck. Since we started we've modified the way we work, making the process more efficient. It used to take eight or nine weeks per cabinet, now we are down to five weeks."

If the UFB is about a production line, the RBI is about bespoke tailoring. Maunsell says the job means taking fibre to rural schools and mobile data towers and "every site is different".

The engineering challenges are unlike in the towns. He says when engineers dig trenches in urban areas there are other services in the ground to worry about: gas, water or power.

That's not the case out in the country where you can be pretty certain there's nothing along the side of the road, so tractors with mole-ploughs can dig quickly.

It's not just engineering. Chorus general manager marketing and sales Victoria Crone says there's a challenge working with councils and regional councils in each of the 24 regions where her company is building the fibre network.

She says: "While the rules are the same, each council has different interpretations and ways of working."

Crone says dealing with a single home standing on a suburban street is easy enough, but the job gets much harder with multiple dwellings and dealing with homes down right-of-ways. She says apart from anything else, getting consent to build can be difficult. Another obstacle is the strategy of delivering fibre to priority customers first. Crone says this leads to a fragmented network build, which is not the most efficient way of working.

The rollout

Chorus alone will spend in the region of $200m to $300m a year on engineering. This year the company, or rather its engineering contractors, will install 360 new fibre roadside cabinets.

Cable plans are re-connected

Fears Pacific Fibre's abortive project would put off new submarine cable initiatives have proved unfounded. Two new players have stepped forward promoting two very different approaches to boosting New Zealand's international communications links.

Tasman Global Access (TGA), a consortium of Telecom NZ, Vodafone and Telstra has outlined plans for a transtasman cable costing around $70 million, connecting Auckland's west coast with Australia. Consortium members say the cable could be completed by as early as the end of next year.

When TGA was announced in February, Telecom NZ CEO Simon Moutter and Vodafone CEO Russell Stanners said 40 per cent of international traffic from their companies is now to Australia and that had grown four-fold since 2000.

Increasingly data used in New Zealand is delivered from servers in Australia, but, they said, an additional transtasman link would increase the case for NZ-located servers. TGA plans to lay three fibre pairs with a total capacity of 30 terabits per second - that's 300 times today's internet demand.

A more ambitious plan from Hawaiki Cable aims to link Australia and New Zealand to Pacific Island nations and from there to Hawaii where it will use existing cables taking traffic to the USA. The $350 million project recently signed an agreement with Northland Inc to land its cable in Whangarei.

Hawaiki first surfaced a year ago at the Pacific Leaders Forum in the Cook Islands. The company is a group of former telecommunications executives including CEO Remi Galasso who had a high-profile role at Alcatel Lucent and was part of the failed SPIN cable project. Hawaiki's plan combines elements of the failed Pacific Fibre and SPIN cable projects. It says its network could be in operation within two years. The network would add around 20 terabits per second in capacity.

There's no immediate need to build additional submarine cable capacity out of New Zealand. Only a fraction of the existing Southern Cross Cable Network's capacity is used at the moment. Last month the company said it had increased its capacity to 12 terabits per second.

Many in the industry believe the main case for a new cable is the additional competition. This could bring down prices and, in turn, increase the data caps on individual internet accounts.

There's also concern about relying on a single service provider, although the Southern Cross network has two links into New Zealand providing a degree of redundancy. Another possible reason to add capacity now are concerns the Southern Cross network is approaching the half-way point in its life expectancy.

A number of industry bodies, including internetNZ and the Telecommunications Users Group, along with smaller telecommunications companies, have expressed concern over Telecom's involvement in TGA given its 50 per cent ownership of Southern Cross. The Commerce Commission has said it will keep a watch on developments in case there are competition issues.

Independence from telecommunications companies was part of Pacific Fibre's pitch when the company tried and failed to raise the $400 million needed to build an Australia-New Zealand-US cable.