Need for speed

Neil de Wit

In Sweden, the debate is whether internet access of 100 MB a second is enough, or if they should go to 1 gigabyte - 10 times faster. In New Zealand, few users get even one percent of that capacity.

We can't blame it on geography or population. Sweden is a long, narrow, mountainous country, about as long as New Zealand, and with a similar population. But 90 per cent of the population has high-speed fibre optics to the home already.

Some people here will soon get that sort of bandwidth on steroids, but they will be in universities, the National Library, crown research institutes or associated companies on a network being built by Research and Education Advanced Networks New Zealand.

REANZ kicked off last year with a $43 million grant from the government, building on work done by the Next Generation Internet group. REANZ chairman Jim Watson says contracts with TelstraClear are almost ready, and the first nodes of the network should be live by August.

The network will have a 10 Gbit per backbone with users getting up to 100 Mbit per second. Dr Watson says under the terms of its contract with government, REANZ can't be competing with the telco's own internet businesses. But he says there should be trickle down.

"Once it is up and running, the speed and power available will in itself be an incentive for telcos to make similar networks available," Watson says.

As well as REANZ, the Government is also putting together a government network to provide fast connections between government agencies, and it is backing the broadband challenge aimed at boosting internet capacity in the regions.

That seems to point to a lack of overall strategy, which is how many in the internet community are seeing it.

Neil James from the Next Generation Internet New Zealand says it has to be seen as a good start.

"Underlying all this is huge angst about being seen to interfere in the market, and that dominates everything instead of taking the opportunity to think what is best for New Zealand in a holistic way," James says.

"In an ideal world, the basic infrastructure like laying fibre would be seen like putting down rail tracks, it should be controlled by the community, NZ Inc, with the commercial stuff built on top of that."

Keith Davidson, the chief executive of InternetNZ, says he welcomes the advanced network, even if it has an exclusive user group.

"The mistake New Zealand often makes is 'what about me' - every last mile issue has to be resolved before we start work on the first mile, so huge delays build up," Davidson says.

He said as the network is developed, the government is starting to wake up to the potential of some of the other networks it owns, such as those of Broadcast Communications.

"The main thrust of the debate is there is no silver bullet, unbundling the local loop won't fix all the problems of the New Zealand internet.

"Years of light-handed regulation means the dominant telco has made promises to deliver better, faster, sooner, and it has consistently failed to deliver anything useful."

The imact of a high-speed network can be seen in Wellington, which has become a film, media and internet centre because of the bandwidth offered through the Citylink network. Citylink is the reason Trademe was able to grow so fast to serve up 60 per cent of New Zealand internet pages and justify its $700 million price tag.

CityLink's Neil De Wit says copper-based technologies are irrelevant for discussion of future internet, apart from the last 100 metres.

Simon Riley, the chief executive of Next Generation Internet New Zealand, says urban fibre networks such as CityLinks may be the best hope for the majority of New Zealand's internet users.

"We are losing perspective on where the end game should be. It is easy for the debate to be anti-Telecom, but that is taking the eye off the end game," Riley says.

"The question now is whether the government has the political will to work with all the identified stakeholders to deliver a national plan and for the government to fill any gaps."

Riley says part of the future has to be open-access networks.

"The other part of the plan is how to create the right market conditions to continue satisfying all industry players.

"We have to start looking over the horizon now to say where we will be in 2010, where we will be in 2016."