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Complaints about the poor state of broadband access in Mahurangi were aired at a public meeting in Warkworth on June 9, hosted by Rodney MP Mark Mitchell.
About 90 residents from across the region attended the event and described the frustrations of accessing the internet, trying to upgrade to a better speed and dealing with Chorus.
The impacts of the poor service on the area’s business and economic growth, as well as the way it disadvantaged students trying to access online learning environments, was highlighted.
A 3D animation student, who lives at Sandspit, said he was expected to access streaming video tutorials as part of his study.
“It was impossible to do this from home because the service was so poor,” he said. “How can a community grow when the education facilities can’t function?”
While communications infrastructure company Chorus talks about rolling out a world class service … “letting you access media rich services like internet television and high definition video conferencing” … the experience on the ground is more Third World.
A Matakana resident said Chorus had refused to put them on the waiting list for VDSL unless they put in a landline first. A North Park resident said the 120 houses in the development were stuck on ADSL2 because they weren’t eligible for rural broadband, couldn’t get Very High-Speed Digital Subscriber Line (VDSL) because they were more than 900m from an exchange, and had no access to ultra-fast broadband (UFB).
Another resident said his service had been “upgraded” on June 2. “As a result, our speed dropped from 7.9 megabytes to 5.2.”
Darrell McNab, of Rodney Broadband, a private company that is providing wireless internet connections and temporary wi-fi hotspot installation, said this was probably because more people had been added to the service, reducing everyone’s speed.
“The pie is just getting cut into smaller pieces,” he said.
His experience showed that many residents were putting up with services that were slow and unreliable. In Duck Creek, households had upload and download speeds of around 500 kilobytes.
“The infrastructure is struggling to keep pace with technological change,” he said. “The copper phone lines that are used to deliver broadband are old and rotten, and have been damaged by wear and tear.”
The seasonal influx of visitors over summer also posed a problem.
“Management of traffic loads is important, as anyone who lives at Omaha will know. When the population there triples over summer, it sinks the network.”
On the question of accessing UFB which was already installed to schools, Mr McNab said it wasn’t as simple as just cutting into the line, even if it did run “straight past your house”.
“There is an enormous cost involved in installing a cabinet and reticulating the service to other users.”
