Wellington Broadband
January 30th, 2007 at 11:24 am by David FarrarExcellent to see Mayor Kerry Prendergast promising a focus on better broadband in Wellington, even talking of fibre to the home for the whole of Wellington.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the Council itself providing money, but as Kerry suggests they could make council-owned ducting and sewers available to a network partner.
There’s actually a lot of things a local authority can do, to make it easier for broadband to happen in their area. Zoning and resource consents, notification of any digging up of roads to broadband providers, notification of new subdivision activity etc. In fact one of the things on my to do list for this year is to get some experts together and see if we can come up with a nice list of say 10 simple steps for a local authority to help encourage broadband infrastructure. Again these may not even involve money, or significant money – just making sure some trench is laid every time a road is dug up helps – that will massively cut the cost of future fibre if the trench is already there.
Related posts:
- Wellington Broadband
- Broadband plans unveiled
- Latest Broadband Stats
- Fibre To The Home for new subdivision
January 30th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
The single smartest thing any City authority could do is to start the process of investing in service tunnels in their CBD with the intent of extending them into the suburbs over a period of decades.
Every modern building needs water, sewerage, stormwater, power, gas and communication services, and at present every provider of each of these is constantly digging up the road to install, service or modify them. In any CBD district the current plan for just the existing services is a maze of pipe and cables, that if you are lucky bear some resemblence of what you actually find when you start digging.
The correct way forward is to have a publicly owned service tunnel down the middle of every street, into which ALL of these services can be installed and far more easily maintained. Over time the initial cost would be hugely re-couped in lower maintenance costs, and would also make responding to changing technologies far easier. No-one for instance wants to bury 1000′s of km of comms technology that may well be obsoleted in less than a decade.
The payback over say 50-100 years would be huge…but of course none of the short-term thinking “it’s got to turn a profit next quarter” types who run this world could stomach that.
Vote: