World-class rural broadband rollout begins at school

MEDIA STATEMENT - 30 June, 2011

World-class rural broadband rollout begins at school

Thousands of students in rural schools throughout the country will soon experience the benefits of ultra-fast broadband as Telecom's network arm, Chorus, begins work to deliver fibre-to-the-school.

Today marks the beginning of the Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) rollout with the first three schools - Henderson Valley School, Te Kura o Omaio School in the Bay of Plenty and Granity School on the West Coast - using a new RBI fibre optic cable connection.

Communications Minister, Hon. Steven Joyce was in Henderson Valley while Minister for Education, Hon. Anne Tolley was in Omaio to see students connect to an e-learning class to demonstrate the applications that can be delivered over fibre optic technology.

Chorus CEO Mark Ratcliffe was also on hand to celebrate the occasion and says he is delighted to be at the start of the journey to deliver fibre to 700 rural schools within the next five years.

"It's a great privilege to be part of building New Zealand's future communications network, and yet be able to see today the difference it can make to the way rural students use the internet," Ratcliffe said.

Granity School pupils were also able to make the most of their new RBI fibre connection to link in to the same e-learning demonstration session on Te Reo Maori and another on Astronomy.

As part of its rural rollout, Chorus will deploy around 3,100km of new fibre optic cable to connect 93 percent of rural schools by the end of 2015. It will also install or upgrade 1,000 fibre-fed cabinets to enable 5Mbps broadband or faster to about 57 per cent of rural customers.

Chorus is building a RBI network which allows service providers to deliver their services to their customers. This means rural customers will also have a range of service providers to choose from.

Today's demonstration used a business grade Wholesale broadband service to link all three schools together. This was delivered in Henderson Valley School by Maxnet and Watchdog, in Granity and Te Kura o Omaio schools by Telecom and Smart Computer Systems Ltd.

Chorus and Vodafone have been jointly selected to deliver the Government's RBI objectives. Chorus will enable 100Mbps services to 93 percent of rural schools and Vodafone has committed to deliver 5Mbps wireless broadband services to more than 80 percent of rural households within six years.

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