Govt eye on broadband to help win rural vote
Page 1 of 2 5:00AM Thursday June 28, 2007
The poor state of phone and internet services in rural areas is back on the agenda and Communications Minister David Cunliffe has sent a strong hint that the Government is considering building a network to plug coverage gaps.
"I want to say that I am hearing loud and clear from farmers and rural New Zealand a great deal of disquiet about the state of the network," Cunliffe told a conference in Auckland this week.
"Quite clearly, there has been a history of under-investment in rural telecommunications, and we want to see that turned around."
What exactly the Government has in mind for farmers is far from clear. The last publicly funded foray into rural broadband was in the form of the flawed Project Probe, which was designed to connect rural schools and communities but did little for competition as Telecom picked up the lion's share of the money.
Cunliffe's timing, a few years after Probe, is impeccable. By the time any plan for a new Government-funded rural broadband project has worked its way through the Cabinet and into the planning stage, we'll be in the run-up to an election.
Given the recent politicisation of the broadband issue since the Government moved in to open up Telecom's copper-line monopoly, rural broadband is likely to be one of Labour's key election pledges.
The same situation has just played out across the Tasman where Prime Minister John Howard and his Government, facing an election later this year, have just committed more than $1 billion to allow Opel - a private partnership of telecoms operator Optus and rural services provider Elders, to build a wireless broadband network covering hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in rural Australia.
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