It’s hard to argue with the sentiment behind the Government’s Rural Broadband Initiative.

The Government says it wants to see an improvement in broadband services in rural areas, due to the key role played by the rural sector in increasing the country’s productivity.

Rural Women New Zealand (RWNZ) would have to agree with that. What is debatable is the way it plans to get there and the length of time it’s going to take to get all rural households and businesses connected to affordable broadband.

While the Government is set to spend $1.5 billion on upgrading urban broadband, spending on the chronically underfunded rural broadband service is limited to direct funding of $48 million, with further interim funding of $52m. The rest of the $300m Rural Broadband Initiative is to come from industry.

‘Why is public funding going in to urban broadband, which is already offering customers better and better service due to market competition, while rural areas stagger along largely on dial up?’ asks, RWNZ telecommunications spokeswoman Jacky Stafford.

The Ministry for Economic Development’s (MED) rural broadband proposal reveals its priority for the next six years is to deliver ultra fast broadband (100Mbps) to New Zealand schools – including 93% of rural schools.

‘But it plans to take up to 10 years to deliver fast broadband at 5Mbps to 80% of rural households and businesses. RWNZ believes this rollout is far too slow, and the impact on rural communities as a whole needs to be looked at,’ says Stafford.

‘Half of all rural households are still on dial up, which means they just can’t participate in today’s digital world.’

The MED says the Government intends to ‘maximize the spill-over benefits’ for rural communities of connecting schools to ultra fast broadband. Hopefully lessons have been learned from Project Probe (2002-2005), which was also intended to strengthen the rural economy on the back of delivering broadband to rural schools.

While 891 out of 900 rural schools did gain access to broadband, the spill-over into the greater rural community was more limited. A lack of marketing meant community uptake was not as fast as it could have been, while many households were not close enough to a school to be able to connect.

For these the choices are to do daily battle with dial up or pay the substantially higher price of wireless or satellite access.

In this latest attempt to haul rural New Zealand into the digital age, rather than delivering the Rolls Royce of internet to schools as its priority, the Government might first consider delivering affordable broadband to every rural household, RWNZ believes.

This could be achieved through the existing ADSL copper network in many instances, and spare wireless ‘backhaul’ could also be tapped into. In this way expensive installation of new fibre could be minimised.

‘Broadband could be installed at every phone cabinet in the country, and all the phone subscribers wired up in one go, rather than sending out a technician to connect each new broadband customer,’ says Stafford.

‘Then all the customer needs to do is contact their phone company to set up their broadband account. The uptake in rural communities would go through the roof.

‘We need affordable, accessible broadband, and we need it now - not in six to ten years time.’

Submissions on the Rural Broadband Initiative proposal close at 5pm on Friday, October 30, 2009 – visit www.med.govt.nz