I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
I had this opinion piece published in the Dominion Post this morning…
Through the 90’s Wellington transformed itself from a grey Government town to a vibrant cultural hotspot. This vibrancy created a culture of networking and innovation resulting in a number of digital content and technology success stories in the 00’s. Mayors Fran Wilde and Mark Blumsky lead the revolution. Those initiatives have stalled and its time to reignite. It’s time for Wellington 2.0.
A common infrastructure component that drives innovation is Broadband. We have left development of this vital infrastructure for a knowledge economy to the telecommunications providers who’s internal goals and short sightedness has kept us away from the vital economic transformation that information technology can provide.
Grand strategies wither on the vine. We need simple, actionable, strategies to relight the fire of transformation and participate in the opportunities of the global knowledge economy.
Appropriately the Wellington 2.0 has two simple pillars.
1. Broadband is a key regional asset. The infrastructure should be encouraged and invested in by local authorities, in the same way water and sewage are.
2. We need to connect our City electronically to other Cities. Christchurch, Auckland, New York, LA, Singapore, London.
Copper based Broadband technologies do not provide the step change in experience that fibre based Broadband provides. Allowing local groups to connect at very high speed fosters innovation. It would be unlikely for a YouTube to come out of NZ. More likely is clever ‘trickle download to cache’ technology that squeezes content through our thin pipes.
The most important data I have at home is my kids photos and videos. I’d love it to be continuously backed up off site. Even that base human requirement would blow broadband data caps within seconds.
Wellington has been very lucky by the energy of a few people over the last few years that established the CityLink and CafeNet networks. These provide a first world connection. The Wellington City Council provided support by allowing the stringing of cables over the trolley bus wires. That relaxed attitude kick-started our local knowledge economy. We need to build from that.
The strategy is simple. Local councils have to encourage the inexpensive laying of fibre out to the suburbs. Every time a trench is opened up, whack some glass in it. The end points might be wireless at first but eventually people will get hooked up. A regional broadband coordinator can be goaled with developing the network and minimising resource management issues. A register of interest might allow communities to share the cost of end points.
Carriers would also be welcome to provide services over the network. But the raw piping needs to be seen as an asset to the city and its people. We need to own our own local loop.
Local broadband infrastructure provides a competitive advantage to a city. Better security, better working from home, telecommuting, Internet television, education, ability to do big global jobs from Island Bay. It also fosters innovation. Our strength is our quick forming networks, which will exploit connectivity. The coordination is bigger than one company yet benefits all so it is a good use of the local authority.
In parallel with developing our local Broadband networks, we need to connect our businesses, education facilities and other interested groups to the world. In this day of web cams it is a scandal that you cannot make a reliable Voice call over the Internet (VOIP). This is not just about avoiding the Telco tax it is about subscribing to a US VOIP Service and having a US phone number so that we appear very close to our markets. It is speculated widely in the industry that the carriers are deliberately introducing noise and latency into the networks to make VOIP unreliable. It’s working. This practice is simple anti-business and the carriers must be pulled out of their position as spoiler.
A simple remedy would be for local authority agencies, like Positively Wellington Business, to act as an aggregator to put together a clean Broadband connection out of New Zealand. This connection would easily pay for itself. The initiative just requires coordination. We need to get past simple VOIP and having a US phone number and raise our sights to high-resolution video conferencing. We lead in this technology with Access Grids and other work coming out of Christchurch’s HIT lab. Once we have true high speed connections to our markets we really can begin to export bits.
Central Government can then help by putting these video meeting nodes in each of the NZTE offices. You can almost imagine a ‘Star Gate’ like experience where we can have rich interactions with our beachhead points around the globe. Wellington companies able to inexpensively meet with the world in a high resolution, environmentally friendly, way.
Of course Wellington 2.0 could be ‘any NZ city 2.0’, and that is the point. We need to compete to raise the bar and cooperate by connecting.
So there it is. A simple two part strategy to relight the Wellington economy and keep our unique and special city moving forward. Why can’t that work?
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I absolutely agree that bandwidth should be seen as an asset for our city. I’m absolutely sure that the lack of decent bandwidth out here on the rim certainly does hold back business and growth here in Wellington… however, not enough attention is paid to the international bandwidth. Its all very well having 10Mbp/s to the house, but when that translates into speeds of 200 to 800 kbp/s in your daily internet use, what is the point.
Living and working overseas I got used to the life changing effects of decent bandwidth, supposedly only 2 or 3 Mbp/s but if you are in the centre of a highly connected internetwork thats a really good 2 or 3 megabits.
Its time we started focusing, and lobbying, not just for improvements on the last mile, but for the quality of our core networks through better peering and, simply, more bandwidth for the whole country.
Hear hear!
Do you see this as a ‘private enterprise’ or a ‘governmental’ (be it local or central) roll - or a happy meeting of both?
Happy meeting of both. CityLink would be the obvious first private partner in Wellington.
Need to focus your topic more. You talk about owning the local loop, but then suggest the solution is a clean broadband connection out of NZ. 100Mbps clean international bandwidth is about $1.5million annual cost. You already have open access in Wellington if you talk to the right people. Make 10Mbps ISP access and 100Mbps local/national peered access available to schools for free - that’s a worthy initiative.
Maybe I didn’t make it clear. It is a 2 part strategy. We have to do both sides.
[...] BAM! Rod Nails it.: [...]
I see this type of infrastructure investment as an absolute necessity if NZ is to fully utilise its creative talent. The prospect of NZ failing to take advantage of this opportunity is appalling to me. There are plenty of people who are prepared to say “something should be done about this”, I would like to do something.
It seems to me Wellington 2.0 (NZ 2.0?) is a workable strategy. Let’s convert the strategy into a plan of action.
Agree that broadband is an essential for growth.
Change is the net sum of individual choices. I currently have few choices to make in terms of the quality of service I receive. The lack of choice stems from allowing our government to sell the rights to our communications infrastructure, and current attempts to wrest some of these rights back from Telecom are unethical and will be seen by other countries as a simple third world nationalisation.
We therefore have a catch22. Rod suggests “we need to own our local loop” and he is right. But who is we? and how do we transition from here to there? I expect to spend 10k - 15k over the next 10 years on telecommunications services, and would gladly put this up front to fund new infrastructure. But infrastructure takes time to build, and few consumers will wish to pay to support two different parallel infrastructures.
Local authorities are profit based and must provide a cost/benefit to their constituents. If private enterprise cannot justify laying cable then it seems unlikely that local authorities would have enough support for a business case to become installers, owners and controllers of this new infrastructure. But I might be wrong in this. The attractor affect of bandwidth for both individuals and businesses might underly the business case.
I certainly agree that at a political level we should endeavour to make access to installation of fibre easy both locally and nationally.
As an individual therefore the key questions remain:
1. Is their a collective will to provide a mandate to local government to proceed with building new infrastructure?
2. As an individual how do I redirect my funds to a supplier who can make it happen?
Good points Philip. A register of those who would pay for infrastructure is an easy thing a coordinating group could provide.
On who is we. My belief is that local broadband infrastructure is an asset of the city and that we need to get that on the agenda.
[...] Making progress behind the scenes on Wellington 2.0. [...]
Just got a letter from Xtra today re their broadband service. Figured you’d be interested as it relates to your thoughts in this post.
Basically, they are apologising for the effect the “download speeds as fast as your phone line allows†has had on my broadband service at home. Some customers, and I am one of them, now have a slower speed. Get this, its now 288 kbps!
They say they can’t avoid this reduction in speed, as “… it’s a result of the way broadband technology works.†- that’s obviously a customer service comment.
Kindly though they will credit 3 months to my account. They also suggest 3 option that are now open to me. These include; a) don’t change, b) change to dial up (can you believe that?!!!), or c) cancel the service.
The Xtra website explains that I may experience a slowed connection if I “live a long way from their phone exchange”. I guess living in the whop whops of Brooklyn/South coast, Wellington isn’t central enough for full broadband speeds. At least I’m faster than the ‘old days of 256 kbps’, infact 12.5% faster. Kinda like GST - Good Sh*t Telecom.
Awesome post Rod, one of your comments about NZTE offices having video gateways was of particular interest since I did some work on something similar earlier this year but with a focus on giving the NZTE offices the ability to publish their material via a touch screen console rather than printing books that sit on shelves and go out of date.
I think that the Wellington community is such that Wellington could become the kick-start hub for this initiative in NZ. It does need a driving force though and I guess PWB would make sense.
That last comment posted by Graeme Harre made me laugh (not at Graeme), but it also added to the growing concern I have for the whole NZ Broadband debacle. I hear stories like Graeme’s almost every second day, lost count on how many since October but it is a very common topic of discussion these days, it needs fixing.
[...] Following up on the Wellington 2.0 concept it was exciting to read in the paper this morning that Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast is making broadband a local body election issue. [...]
Hi Rod,
Great article. I moved to Wellington from San Francisco 2 years ago, partially because of CityLink. More specifically, I wanted to be in an environment where a company like CityLink would thrive. Word got back to CityLink about me, and they did a little interview with me:
http://www.r2.co.nz/20051103/calhoun.asx
The above is linked from the CityLink monthly report page:
http://citylink.co.nz/community/report-archive.html
And yes, I love Wellington. :-)
Thanks Rod. As a longtime Wellingtonian and telecommunications sector participant I’m keen to see broadband rolled out across the city. I’m told there is quite a lot of unlit fibre around the city already. Isn’t it a matter of identifying the areas where gaps exist and also addressing the question of why companies that already own fibre aren’t using it? I’d be interested in your thoughts.
It seems to me we also need some leadership at Council on this issue - that’s one of the reasons I’m standing in the Northern Ward at these elections.