Jeremy Tauri: Wireless brings joy

Rural broadband is a game-changer.

If there's one thing that I am grateful for, it is the time we changed to wireless rural broadband. We live about 20 minutes southwest of Whangarei where the nearest neighbour is several hundred meters away and dairy cows inhabit paddocks around us.

It's an isolated bliss that came with internet nightmares. Broadband over the copper lines through the exchange was teeth gritting.

My wife and I, although not farmers, work from our rural home several days of the week. We dial into work through remote access and work on tasks via cloud software. We upload and download large files that would often get about halfway through before freezing, stalling and starting again.

In some cases, we would have to take turns working on the internet because our connection was not strong enough to deal with us both.

But now we are all a little more relaxed thanks to the better speeds we can get on wireless rural broadband. We've also had no faults.

I'm not the only one benefiting from better broadband outside the main centres. The Government has identified it as an issue because UFB and fibre aren't a feasibility for every rural community. It is working with Chorus and Vodafone to deliver rural broadband to smaller centres. Spark has also launched its rural wireless broadband service, using its 4G mobile network.

It's important not to neglect rural New Zealand when it comes to the internet. We're not all farmers out here - there are other small-business owners, schools and residential sections. These communities need access to the internet for the same reason it's needed in the bigger centres.

My only whinge about the service is the cost - we have to have a capped amount of wireless data and it is easily costing us twice as much as we previously paid.