The clamorous disquiet over the Telecommunications (TSO, Broadband and Other Matters) Bill will still be ringing in the Minister's ear.   But even though Telecom NZ was the only submitter to support the Bill, Mr Joyce remains intransigent in his vision of how New Zealand must be given access to the world's information superhighway.  He remains adamant that the Telecoms Bill will pass in to law.

The continuing industry criticism has now turned to calls to stop and take a fresh look at how $1.8Bn of taxpayer's funds is spent.  Last week, Rural Connect again suggested taking a community, rather than a national 'big company', approach to the provision of high speed broadband to under-served rural communities.  

The issue is that the business case for rural broadband is, as Telecom CEO Paul Reynolds said, “difficult”.  Many rural people have been waiting since before 2006 for the government and Telecom Chorus to overcome those difficulties.  The last five years have seen successive governments promise a lot and deliver little.  Under the current government's broadband programs, many households and businesses will continue to wait for another five or more years.   For some communities, this will not matter a great deal.  For others, it matters a lot but there is little that they can do to help themselves.  

The US and UK have community-provided broadband programs to assist those communities that want to help themselves.

In the US, the Universal Service Fund (USF) was created in 1997 to ensure advanced telecommunications services to all schools, health care providers and libraries.  The intent was similar to our own TSO (Telecommunications Service Obligation) which provided funds to ensure that uneconomic rural telecoms services were made available to all.  

The USF was revised in 2010 and now assists the provision of broadband networks that may be owned either by the local town council (municipal broadband) or a separate community-based legal entity (community broadband).  

Across the US, there are now some 133 towns with municipal or community broadband networks and that number is rising steadily to the point that the big telco companies are lobbying state legislators to preclude them.  

Community Broadband makes sense if one views broadband networks as a utility service, just like electricity networks.  It also appeals on the basis that community-owned infrastructure is not vulnerable to the political manoeuvring of government infrastructure or the earnings driven imperatives of telco-owned networks.   And given the slow roll-out of broadband in rural areas, many communities are simply not wanting to wait for someone else to meet their needs.  Just like in New Zealand, the government and telcos have failed rural communities but unlike New Zealand, many US communities are now empowered to take control of their own broadband provisioning. 

The UK government last month announced a £26 million “Community Broadband Fund” to help hard-to-reach rural communities to thrive and end the digital divide between rural and urban areas.  It has been described as an innovative way of assisting people in rural areas to access high speed broadband.

A UK MP summed up the New Zealand situation when he said: "Remote and rural areas have the most to gain from access to broadband but these are the communities currently missing out. The whole of the UK should be able to share in the benefits of broadband and ..."

Oh that our government held such an egalitarian view!  Oh that our government would empower local communities rather than empowering large corporates as the Telecom Bill does!