Dairy Flat frustrated with bad broadband

Unreliable internet service in Dairy Flat has become even more of a problem as parents and students work from home under the Alert Level 4 lockdown measures.

A petition started on April 8 requesting that fibre be rolled out to the area, already has more than 500 signatures. It was started by the Dairy Flat representative on the Rodney Local Board, Louise Johnston, and will be presented to Parliament by Helensville MP Christopher Penk.

Dairy Flat School principal Debbie Marshall says a number of students and their families are struggling with learning from home due to poor internet connections.

To assist with this, Debbie has requested learning packs for delivery to families.

“I have alerted the Ministry of Education and they are aware of the issue,” she says.

Fran Earwaker, who teaches at Dairy Flat School, says trying to hold Zoom lessons with her class is challenging.

“As long as it’s a nice sunny day it’s ok, but as soon as it starts to rain my internet disappears. This is very annoying when I have 22 children on my screen waiting for me to reconnect, as happened last week,” Fran says.

She says hotspotting from a phone is out of the question as the 3G reception is minimal.

“A steady internet connection that doesn’t disappear when it rains would be great!”

Louise Johnston says although the lack of ultra fast broadband has been highlighted by the reliance on the internet during lockdown, those frustrations are nothing new.

Dairy Flat and Coatesville have not been included in upgrades to rural broadband, and are among only 13 percent of New Zealand that have no access to fibre.

“Reliable internet is a modern day necessity,” Louise says.

Her petition asks central Government to increase the funding of the rural fast broadband initiative and include Dairy Flat and Coatesville in the next rollout.

She says it is frustrating that, in 2015, Auckland Council did not include Dairy Flat in the priority areas for expansion of rural broadband services that it recommended for Government funding.

Louise says last year she and Rodney Councillor Greg Sayers met with the Council statistics department to try and understand how the underlying data that led to the omission of Dairy Flat was derived, but were unable to find answers.

The petition can be found on the Change.org website – look for Upgrade Failing Broadband Infrastructure in Dairy Flat and Coatesville.