The tow truck was laden as it turned the corner: a silver Toyota anchored to its deck and a bright blue Mazda trailing off the back. Somehow, in the midst of a thunderstorm, it all went very wrong. The truck clipped a power pole, which broke at the base and fell between it and the trailing car and the whole lot ended in a mess of smashed windscreens and tangled cables in the middle of the road.
This caused a number of problems. Every other route in the vicinity was already either closed for a big stormwater-separation dig or on stop-go signs for roadworks. Tempers flared as drivers made three-point turns in the rain. Vector soon logged an electrical outage. But the internet survived. The thin fibre-optic cables, pulled down with the pole, were all over the road but intact and continued to transmit their bits.
“Fibre is much more resilient than the old copper lines,” enthused my telecommunications commentator friend. “It bends, you can drown it, even in earthquakes it continues to work. Just incredible.”
It couldn’t last. The vehicles had to be removed and after two hours of operating through a crash scene the internet went with them. Still, my friend wasn’t wrong. We’d grown used to internet that, unlike the old copper network that got iffy when it rained, never broke down. One neighbour, a mechanical engineer, had to down tools because his phone’s broadband couldn’t handle the high-resolution computer models he worked with. Another was cursing his luck at having just moved his Sky service to fibre. So much of our lives, work and leisure seems to rely on that infallible connection.
I thought of Steven Joyce. National’s former minister of everything has just published a memoir and I’m not sure if it highlights his role in launching the ultra-fast broadband rollout in 2011, but it should. The story is the more remarkable because it didn’t follow the market orthodoxy of building where the demand was, but installed fibre nearly everywhere, including in places that didn’t yet know what to do with it. Yes, it was a public-private partnership – one that actually worked – but at heart it was an act of nation building the Labour Party would have gladly claimed as its own.
Joyce did, it should be noted, need a Labour government to do it. Most of the UFB contracts went to Chorus and Chorus existed only because in 2006 communications minister David Cunliffe forced Telecom to open its network to competitors.
Business Roundtable chair Rob McLeod wrote a newspaper column that predictably warned about “the heavy hand of regulation”, but by that point even the business sector had fallen out of love with the supposed purity of a set-up that allowed Telecom to control the market at both the wholesale and retail levels, banking monopoly profits in the process. (The Roundtable’s successor, the New Zealand Initiative, recently published an analysis grimly noting the “lacklustre” performance of the old regime it spent years defending.)
In terms of the time-honoured test – how do we compare with Australia? – the two government market interventions are a stunning success. Ookla, the company behind the Speedtest app, places New Zealand 16th in the world for fixed-broadband speeds. Australia has paid many billions of dollars more to be down in the basement at 82.
We were disconnected for two days and the aggravation was compounded by our internet company – the one formerly known as Telecom – mistakenly assuring everyone that everything was fixed. Eventually, after an impressive Saturday shift from a Chorus crew, the fibre lit up again. “We are back!” texted the neighbour, just in time to watch the rugby on his new Sky box.
