North Shore Council Broadband Plans

Pete August 14, 2006 2 min read

Those of our readers who also abide on the North Shore of Auckland, New Zealand may have read a while ago about the council’s plans to partner with Vector Communications to build an advanced broadband network on the North Shore.

Having not heard anything in a number of months on this plan, I decided to make some inquiries to the local council.

I emailed Gary Holmes, and he forwarded my email to Roger Matthews, the Economic Development Manager.

To cut a medium length story short, the proposal was never to create a network for home users, but to connect as many schools as possible.

This is obviously a bit disappointing, but at least it’s good for the North Shore’s schools, maybe worth becoming a teacher for.

Anyway, the council has put in a proposal with Vector as part of the government’s ‘Broadband Challenge‘ which has a total purse of NZ$28 million.

Apparently, that is not actually that much. Roger cited the cost of putting fiber into homes in Brisbane as being A$450m. This could have been part of Telstra’s abandoned A$4 billion project to put fibre in all over the country. That’s A$4000 million. 168 times what the NZ government is offering.

So anyway. The network would offer a blindingly fast 1gb / second to it’s subscribers, which will be primarily schools but also universities, hospitals and other such organisations.