[CAnet - news] Some innovative network solutions from New Zealand

[Although New Zealand is a sparsely populated country, it has developed a
number of innovative private sector grass roots solutions for addressing
last mile connectivity which might be of particular interest to smaller
communities around the world who want low cost, open access broadband.  The
first comes from James Watts of Inspired Networks in Palmerston NZ where the
local ISP has been working with contractors and city water people to throw
in a fiber duct every time they open a trench.  Secondly, Joe Abley reports
that with respect to peering in New Zealnd, it might be worth  pointing out
that Citylink (a disruptive metro ethernet provider  [and dark fiber] in
Wellington, NZ) has been seeding exchange points throughout NZ for some
time. There are five of them live and two being built at the moment, which
is quite substantial given the size of the country and relatively  small
number of cities. See <http://www.nzix.net/> for more details. Some excerpts
from some e-mails from James Watts reprinted with his permission -- BSA]



Inspired Networks has been laying duct and/or fibre around our town for the
last several years, we have done it in a variety of ways, the cheapest way
is by providing kegs of beer to Christmas functions etc for contractors, and
they keep me informed of where they are digging. They also often throw our
100mm duct into the trenches they dig at no or minimal charge (sub
$10NZ/metre). Consequently we keep a stock of duct in each contractors yard
that we can locally, and they just let us know what they have layed for us
lately. Its also a sweetner to them for jobs where we will often pay them to
dig an extra 10 or 20 metres off the end of their job to hook up to our
closest duct, meaning they can make a bit more money while they have their
diggers/trucks on site, and also meaning we get away with not paying things
like traffic management fees and road closures etc, as they have already
been done.

My latest initiative is I have our local council finally onboard (at the
lowest levels anyway) and have done a deal with the city water planner, and
he is charging me $10/metre to lay duct where ever they are laying
watermains, currently the deal is they put our duct in every trench, unless
we ask not to be. This has been most fortunate as our council is in the
middle of an upgrade plan to upgrade the old cast iron water mains, and are
planning some 30km+ of trench in the next couple of months.

We do sell everything from lit fibre 100Mbit and 1Gbit, as well as dark
fibre to anyone that wants it. The goal of the network is to cover its
costs, I am building it more as a community initiative due to the fact my
local council hasn't.

The idea is we will build a fibre infrastructure on the same principal as
sewer or water, where there is one resource in the ground, but sane and
reasonable and fair rules around anyone using it. Currently we have a few
businesses that just bought a pair of fibre to connect their offices, so
there were no security issues or anything, through to covering 2500 rooms
with 10Mbit in the student hostels with cheap access (starting with $20
"broadband" with no phoneline required), and about 45 buildings where we
have a fibre feed in to a switch where we do ethernet connectivity to end
users. The next stage we are currently laying should cover around another
500 small business buildings.

I must mention another of our current finance options, we have been talking
to a lot of the people building subdivisions and the local monolpoly Telco
has fixed rates for putting copper into new subdivisions, a recent example
is one about 40km out of town, they quoted $3500/section to provide service,
and it's a requirement for resource consent to have it. They used to get
away with this due to no competition, so I made the suggestion we could do
fibre with a phone service at $450/section, and they matched the cost. This
saved the subdivider $3000 per section, and he agreed that in exchange for
us helping him get the cost down that he paid us to put in our fibre also.
So therefore instead of $3500/section he paid $450 to us and $450 to the
monopoly provider, and all his houses have both services, a win for
everybody. The standard rates from our monopoly telco seem to be $1250 per
house in town or $3500 out of town, unless there is competition, then the
rate is $450 per house.


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