UFB is much faster, because it is transmitted over fibre-optic cables, which means the signal doesn’t decay with distance. Two years ago, Te Wānanga o Raukawa installed a fibre-optic cable down Mill Road, to the university. Connections to rununga, two kura, Otaki primary and Otaki College were also made. The Wānanga hopes to extend their high-speed internet to include the greater Otaki community, and further announcements are expected. If you’re within a few kilometres of the Chorus exchange in Mill Road, today you can achieve up to 10 megabits/second (Mb/s) in Broadband download speed, about half that at Te Horo Beach, and virtually no broadband at Otaki Beach. A movie is about 700 Megabytes, so it would take you at least 10 minutes to download on the fastest broadband, a lot longer at the extremities of Otaki. Vodafone offer 5Mb/s at reasonable rates if you install a dish, which is a solution in the worst cases around Otaki. But if you had the luxury of UFB, which will come to the rest of Kapiti in the next year or two, you would be able to download your movie in a minute or two. And it gets worse. With Sky TV losing out on it’s English football broadcasts, which will now only be available via broadband. Without UFB, we are entering a further area of disadvantage.Otaki College has had fibre for a couple of years already, thanks to the Wānanga. Chris Magill, their IT wizard is enthusiastic about what it offers them in educational enhancements. Right now they have over 250 PCs, which means one computer for every 2 students. Eventually they will have a tablet computer for every student. With a speed of 100 Mb/s the world of interactive learning is giving Otaki students a huge advantage, ensuring that they will hit the workplace tech-savvy and switched on. Meanwhile, moves are afoot to get fibre more widely available in Otaki, despite the government’s neglect. Already the Wānanga fibre network is available at the Cleantech centre in Riverbank Road, and with a new Cleantech Trust building rumoured for later in the year, this is getting important. With backing from the Wānanga, KCDC, Grow Wellington, Stuart Prichard and CSS Technologies even more services are likely to become available. Beyond this, does Otaki have to wait until the rest of New Zealand is UFB equipped before we can have high bandwidth? Possibly not. Antony Royal of TWOR is optimistic that they can find further solutions to allow others in Ōtaki to benefit from high speed communications. Rather than wait for the government’s implementation partner, Chorus to connect up the rest of the country, it would be a huge feather in Otaki’s cap if we could demonstrate our independence and self-reliance and support our local initiatives. Watch this space...
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 01:36:05 +0000
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