Category: WISP Profiles

NetSpeed – a WISP Profile by Ernie Newman

No disrespect – but sartorial elegance is not usually a defining characteristic of the rugged rural blokes who typify the WISP community. But then, Stan and Heather Rivett aren’t your typical WISP stereotypes.

Stan (founder), wife Heather (recently recruited director) and dog Trixie greet me in their offices in Ocean View on the Otago Coast  looking like city business people. No sign of the High-Viz and steel capped boots favoured by most WISP owners. Nor the standard 4WD – just a sedan, albeit a high performance one as Stan is a serious petrolhead. It’s a Friday and I’m on holiday so I feel a bit underdressed.

But I soon discover one crucial difference between Netspeed and the more conventional WISPs. Netspeed is a franchise operation. The Rivetts and their team run the office and customer service centre, the field work is done by the franchisees.

Stan started Netspeed in 2003 – “I was bullied into it by friends,” says Stan. In those days he was running a retail car stereo business in Dunedin, importing the equipment and selling it on TradeMe. So he advertised and quickly sold three franchises, in Christchurch, Wanaka and Oamaru. “It was a good proposition,” he says – “we signed our three franchise holders before servicing a single customer.”

The customers came thick and fast. It’s a familiar story – serious regional businesses trying desperately to get by on ADSL, Jetstream and dial-up. So a 10Mbps offering over wireless was a great attraction.

The early services were over a frame relay, and two years in Stan still had dial-up in his own office. But then a migration to WISP Wireless sent the business down a more conventional track. With a serious competitive advantage for rural customers.

The franchise arrangement works very well according to Stan. “We have local people to run the business in their local area while we provide the customer service, help desk, operations, technical support, accounting and marketing. We’ve built our own cloud-based accounting system.”

Heather joined the business as co-Director three years ago, following a corporate career. “I enjoy our customers and sales. I also work with Tania on the accounts and marketing as well as pulling the systems into shape.”

The Rivetts have an enthusiastic office team around them. Matt is the longest serving – he is Support Team Leader doubling as chief Coder and sometime hacker. Nick, who does marketing and promotions, has been there 2 years. Elliott, in charge of support calls and sales, is more recent. Among them all they handle functions as diverse as graphic design, social media, and technical support for all the franchises. It’s a tight, energised workplace.

Irene Walton is an enthusiastic customer of Netspeed. I visit her in the Karitane home she has just moved to and is renovating. Karitane is her 4th Netspeed connection having earlier connected to them while living and working in Wanaka, Hawea Flat, and Owaka where she and her husband owned a restaurant.

“Their service was absolutely 100% in all four locations,” Irene told me.

“They’re exceptionally helpful – whenever there’s been an issue they’re right onto it – even if its something like a PC issue that’s nothing to do with them. They talk me through it. They’re patient and never pass the buck.”

“When we arrived here in Karitane we needed a new chip. Nick arrived with it on a Sunday afternoon – he’d gone out for a Sunday drive and brought it. By comparison with Xtra in the early days, we could never even get hold of them.”

The Canterbury Dimension

It’s a major hike to the Rakaia Gorge in inland Canterbury but next morning I turn up to meet Netspeed Canterbury franchisee David Gabites at the quaintly named Windwhistle Garage. His network runs 125km from Christchurch to Lake Coleridge and provides connectivity to most of the farms in the Rakaia Valley, and more recently to Upper Glenthorne. At the extreme its 190km from Christchurch across 12 radio hops. Customers include a dozen high country stations with about 35 users including farm workers – in some cases the workers’ cottages are part of the main farm account and in others they are billed separately. There’s no cellular coverage in most of these areas.

“This place is called Windwhistle for a reason,” David tells me. Not the case on this sunny spring day, but David should know – his father was an accountant in Ashburton and had many clients in the high country including the famous Erewhon Station. The high winds have a major effect on the design of Netspeed’s sites which are engineered to withstand quite exceptional gusts.

“I was a retailer in an earlier life,” he tells me. “One day Telecom sent me a letter out of the blue apologising for the quality of my Internet in suburban Christchurch and saying there was nothing they could do about it – I hadn’t complained so I don’t know why they wrote. But it caused me to contact Stan Rivett to see what could be done and suddenly I found myself with a franchise.

“Then came the quakes and the GFC – but we got through all that and moved ahead.”

The franchisor/franchisee relationship seems clear and workable. Stan is responsible for monthly invoicing, marketing, the service centre, and the main Christchurch transmission site. David does installation including billing for installs, building and maintaining sites, monitoring, trouble shooting, and the 0800 service calls.

We arrive we up in the hills at Netspeed’s Coleridge site. Coleridge Village is visible just below the ridge. The site services a diversity of customers – big stations, smaller farms, the Mount Olympus ski field, and a hunting lodge. The view is stunning. “On a fine day,” David concedes, “its tempting to come up here and fix something that really doesn’t need fixing.” It sure beats his earlier life as a furniture marketer and salesman, allowing him to exploit his fascination with our high-country farms.

Netspeed is part of a crowded space for Canterbury WISPs with Ultimate and Amuri. But they’re friendly competitors who don’t tend to overbuild each other on the same sites, he says. There’s plenty of scope for all. And although the foundation of the business is rural, Netspeed has a significant number of customers in suburban Christchurch who choose its wireless option because of superior customer service.

On the way back to Windwhistle we stop at a cattle yard to meet happy customer William Innes. William’s been with Netspeed for 9 years. “The previous satellite service was awful and bloody slow,” he says. “Also very expensive with lots of maintenance issues.

“We’re really happy with Netspeed – you get the odd service glitch such as during the Port Hills fire, but they’re quick to fix these. And its great that my young kids (8, 7 and 5) can do their homework on line the same as the city students. The schools more and more just assume that all students have home Internet and fast speeds.”

“Everything on the farm is now done on line – environmental reporting, fertiliser, farm management data, and the whole works. And the Internet makes it far easier to recruit farm workers.”

 

 

Driving back to Windwhistle I feel a long way from Stan and Heather in their Ocean View office. But this team effort with franchisor and franchisee seems to work brilliantly with everyone playing to their strengths and relishing their work. Most important, the high-country residents are very satisfied and happy.

NetSpeed.net.nz

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Wireless Dynamics – a WISP Profile by Ernie Newman

 

“Wireless Dynamics has been our saviour -our previous supplier was very slow and expensive; it worked for the EFTPOS most of the time but beyond that we couldn’t even upload a photo.”

 

So says Suzie Denize, owner of King Country tourist attraction ‘Hairy Feet.’ Suzie hosts thousands of hobbit fans who each year make a pilgrimage to isolated Mangaotaki to experience one of the settings for their favourite movie.

Hobbit-fanciers, of course, want to send lots of photos – but more about hobbits and the Internet later.

Wireless Dynamics began as an add-on to PC-Soft, a Te Kuiti computer business started by Jeremy Earl in 2000 and joined by Harley Cressey seven years later.  Confronted daily with the reality that the quality of copper broadband their customers endured in the King Country was “terrible” and was never going to improve, the pair installed a wireless unit on top of their building across from the Sir Colin Meads memorial. After six months proving the concept and monitoring the effects of the region’s sometimes harsh weather they were ready to go commercial.

“The business came to us,” Jeremy says. “At first people were change-resistant but now there’s no need to convince anyone. People now get today’s reality that you can have the best of both worlds – better quality, and a cheaper price.”

Wireless dynamics has grown to 22 sites and more than 300 customers. It’s still growing. The network kicks in at Otorohanga in the north, goes south to Benneydale, east to around Mapiu (on the highway between Taumarunui and Te Kuiti), and west to the coast. It roughly matches the Waitomo District boundary.

The combined PC and WISP business is run by a tight team of 4 – Clifford and Raj making up the balance. They also rely on some contractors.

On a chilly and very windy early spring day Harley and Jeremy put me in their 4WD truck – with the number plate “BRDBND” – for a half hour drive west to their Oparure site. They’re off to tweak a dish for redundancy. It’s a long way up a very steep hill through a farm that grows warabi – a plant used to make sushi. Once you get off the main roads the King Country is full of surprises! The grass is wet and I’m a bit nervous about the sheer drops alongside, but I soon realise there’s a strong health and safety ethic in this business. Constructive advice about the driving comes continuously from the back seat.

At the summit the wind is a viscous, howling gale. Wrestling to get the door open without losing it, we struggle across to the site. Like all WISP owners these guys take a lot of pride in construction of sites. They have a standard design to minimise the need for spare parts. Their practice is to build ahead of demand, so they are very engaged in getting capacity up ahead of the rugby world cup – this is after all, Pinetree Meads country. “Lots of our customers already stream live TV every night, so we will cope ok with the RWC,” Harley tells me. “As long as the Spark network holds up, ours will too.”

I’ve only got half a mind on the conversation, as I struggle to take photos with the horrendous wind trying to wrest the tablet out of my hand. I have a sudden vision being whisked up into the air and landing back in Te Kuiti like Mary Poppins, which doesn’t seem too far-fetched in these conditions. But aided by a few spare Kg as an anchor I hang on gamely while the guys carefully climb the tower with a compass and spanner to make a small adjustment. By pointing the antenna more accurately to the next hill in the chain, they’ll improve the customer experience.

Twwenty minutes later, back into the 4wd we climb. Down the cliffside, through the wasabi, and we’re on a back road towards Piopio, a small but thriving community 24km from Te Kuiti. Thriving it is because in the mid-2000s residents became concerned about the decline and formed the Project Piopio Trust to promote development.

Over an excellent lunch at the Fat Pigeon café we meet another happy Wireless Dynamics customer and Piopio dweller, Rachel Laver from local boatbuilders, Laver Marine. Rachel’s husband is a cabinet maker. Together they have created a successful niche building high spec, individually crafted dinghies, most of which are made to order for super yachts.

 

“We sell most of our boats over the Web site,” Rachel tells me. “We never meet a lot of the customers. We’re growing fast. Before Wireless Dynamics we were on copper. There were constant outages and we’d wait a week or more for Chorus to get us back on line. We tried hot spotting the mobile phone but it didn’t work. But now, with Wireless Dynamics, the response time is great.

 

 

“We can watch Netflix. The speeds are way better. My husband is on line constantly while he is working.”

“We do the business accounts from home. The kids (7 and 5 years) use the school Chromebooks. Everything is affordable.”

Rachel has had a few jobs round town. One is for the local District Council where she organised the Digital Enablement Plan. “We were writing up all these ideas for better broadband,  but Harley and Jeremy were already in business,” she says. In another role she gives marketing support to Wireless Dynamics – its easy to sense her passion for their business.

The King Country is swamped with small Community Newsletters which Wireless Dynamics support and exploit to get their message through. “They are young, vibrant newsletters for communities where the digital will exists.” The fact that Jeremy and Harley are locals helps to establish trust and credibility.

Versatility is key to the Wireless Dynamics business model. Recently an American film crew came to make a commercial for an internationally famous brand of beer, so they put in a temporary high capacity connection with extension through a small cell unit for a fortnight giving widespread coverage across the site. Similar one-off connections are frequently done for Kapa Haka festivals, indoor sports, and school galas. There’s also a free hotspot on the coast at Mangaotaki.

For our final visit we head off to hobbit territory – “Hairy Feet”, a tourist attraction half an hour north on a country road. As we drive I notice the copper line serving the district strung along spindly old wooden poles by the road. At one point a pole has snapped in half and the wire drags along the grass for several metres. Good luck to anybody hoping to watch Netflix across infrastructure like that – and forget the World Cup!

Its raining at Hairy Feet but that doesn’t diminish the enthusiasm of owner Suzie. “We use the Internet constantly when there are tourists here,” she enthuses while showing us around the shop. “We get really good streaming. My son is mad on online gaming – before Wireless Dynamics he had to live with CDs. I use media for work, uploading visitors’ photos to social media. Phones, EFTPOS – everything here is dependent on connectivity. And the kids now use the Internet for study without having to go offline every time we need to use the connection for business.

“In the past even voice calls used to fail – you feel stupid when a tourist calls from overseas and the phone cuts out! Life is so different now. We’re on a regular circuit for film crews making TV commercials.”

It’s the first week of spring. The tourist season is just beginning. You get the sense that the Hairy Feet team has an extra spring in its step because of having world class Internet access.

Another great example of a WISP lifting the economic and social capability of a New Zealand region.

Wireless Dynamics

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YrlessPlus – A WISP profile by Ernie Newman.

When you ask a business to introduce you to a happy customer to interview, you don’t usually get sent straight to the Mayor. But Gore-based WISP Yrless had me around to the Gore Council chambers, no less, within 5 minutes of reaching town and before I could even rustle up a flat white.

Mayor Tracy Hicks – an imposing figure and considered speaker who would look equally at home in London or New York – is clearly a big Yrless supporter. He and his wife have been customers for years. Before Yrless, the big telcos gave them zero service and overstated their capability, he tells me. The couple switched to Yrless because it’s a local business with a great reputation and highly affordable.

Mayor Tracy enthuses about the difference the WISP service offered by Yrless has made to his district. The connections are excellent, and the coverage has improved vastly – right at the time when broadband has become a necessity on Southland farms. The Council is in the midst of developing a strategy to reflect the diversification and increasing sophistication of its agricultural sector. Lifestyles, young families, and diversification are all making connectivity imperative. Schools need their students to be able to go onto the school Web sites and collaborate on line with peers from their homes, just as kids in the main cities do.

 

“Yrless is an enabler for the district,” he tells me. “I’m excited by the vision and drive – I’ve got nothing but good to say about them.”

That’s from the Mayor, no less! You can’t get a better endorsement.

Back at base, Yrless founder and owner Joe Stringer is happily getting on with the day-to-day job of running a busy WISP. It’s the middle of the Southland winter so the solar panels are running low on some of his 78 rural sites, leaving a few generators struggling. So preventive maintenance is needed to make sure the customers get seamless services. Not a major problem, just part of the day to day job.

Yrless dates back to 2005. Joe trained in IT in Invercargill, then came home to the farm where his family are prominent breeders of Angus cattle. His parents were early adopters of technology and were keen to digitise the stud records – these days they are sent to Feilding and incur a financial penalty if they are not sent electronically.

Dial-up on the farm was never going to do the job. So Joe put up a radio tower so they could get acceptable Internet from Gore. For a while there were just ten customers. Then through his part time role as a volunteer firefighter Joe met business partner Norman McLeod.

“Norm knew the electrical stuff, and I knew the farmers,” Joe says, “so together we turned the business into a serious commercial player.” They were early participants when Voice over IP emerged, and suddenly had 100 customers

Joe is “almost” full time with Yrless. That is, when he’s not occupied on the stud farm, being a volunteer firefighter and trainer for the Gore and Waikaka brigades, paragliding, or learning to fly helicopters. No couch potato, this guy! Luckily there are several other staff – about 4 full timers and a similar number of part timers. Everyone works from home, walking the talk about modern age location-independent working enabled by great connectivity. It’s very successful professionally and personally, Joe says – but he concedes there are times when partners just want to get the staff out of the house for a while!

The Yrless network is extensive. Coverage runs from Milton south of Dunedin, to Mataura south of Gore. Inland it goes to Roxburgh and Lumsden, and on the seaward side to the Catlins area. Other WISPA.NZ member WISPs intersect with Yrless at every boundary, giving a seamless service into Otago and other parts of Southland.

Most Yrless customers are serviced by “WISP wireless” using hilltop sites to bounce the signal from point to point. The company owns some fibre optic cable and has plans for more, but wireless remains its core business. “There will always be links that are uneconomic for fibre,” Joe says, “but the demand for speed is continuing to grow.”

Looking ahead, he has plans to move more into fibre optic. One large dairy farmer is investing substantially to lay fibre to a wintering shed and farm cottages, and Joe has commissioned a hydraulic ram to be attached to a bulldozer (pictured) to lay it. It’s a big investment but well worthwhile for the future.

“We are lucky to have some very forward-thinking farmers in Southland,” Joe says. “High speed resilient Internet brings a lot of efficiencies as well as being a big factor in staff retention.” One example was a recent call from a real estate agent who wanted wireless Internet set up in an empty rural property to make it much more attractive to sell.

Many Yrless customers use their connectivity to support remote operation of highly sophisticated machinery such as grain driers and pellet makers, often controlled 24/7 by operators on the other side of the world. That is hugely efficient and makes reliability seriously important.

The best thing about being a WISP? “Meeting people, helping with installs and sorting out other problems, and seeing places I otherwise wouldn’t,” Joe says.

The most frustrating? “Trying to help people who just don’t get IT.” He laughs, recalling a nice elderly lady who really struggled with the computer. Midway through their conversation she went to answer the phone – putting the Sky remote to her ear. “And I was there to teach her the internet!”

Yrless has big development plans. More fibre – “wireless to the site then fibre around the cluster,” moving into retailing electricity, big data storage, and offering a cellphone service are all on the radar.

An “enabler for the district” with “vision and drive” as the Mayor says?
Absolutely. Watch this space.

YrlessPlus

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UNIFONE – A WISP profile by Ernie Newman.

Chatting with Travis Baird and Glenn Hutton together in their functional but comfortable Balclutha office you can see why their business, Unifone, is so successful. They clearly get along well – there’s a mutual respect and recognition of complementary skills that has worked well for them since their separate WISP businesses merged in 2016.

Way back, while a student living at his parents’ home near Waihola, Travis saw his schoolmates using broadband while he suffered shonky dial-up Internet. With a bit of knowledge about wireless, and some help from his dad who was an electrician, he successfully beamed a signal from Milton to the family farm. The neighbours soon joined in.

Then when Travis went on to Otago University he met a group of fellow students who were also into wireless. Soon Unifone was selling broadband connections to numerous student flats. Travis built the business on his knowledge of the market, and his understanding that struggling students can’t sign year-long contracts – a reality that eluded the mainstream telcos.

Over time, Unifone came to own the Dunedin student telecommunications market and a lot more besides.

Meanwhile Glenn was leaving his role as a plant technician in a major corporate construction company in South Otago and looking for something to do. With a business partner he started a new WISP, Rivernet. Rivernet announced its presence by setting up free WiFi in the main street of Balclutha and then went on to build wireless sites around south Otago.

So, by the time the two businesses merged, both had sizeable footprints – Unifone in the Dunedin-Milton area, and Rivernet centred further south in Balclutha. The merged business took the Unifone name and moved ahead as a single entity, with Travis still based in Dunedin and Glenn in Balclutha.

Glenn recalls that when the two were talking about merging he expressed doubt about the potential for any more growth in South Otago. Travis disagreed and said he could easily increase it, to which Glenn responded that Travis would have to be a genius to achieve that. In a very short time he did so, more than doubling the customer count.

By 2017 when the government’s Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI2) came into the frame, the merged Unifone was already on a strong growth track. Its successful bid will double the number of sites but increase the customer count by a smaller percentage – the RBI2 areas, by definition, are sparsely populated and hard to reach. Glenn says the big benefit of RBI2 was that it drove a more disciplined approach to the way the business is run. “We had to get more structured so as to reach the point of sign-off – we had to involve the lawyer and accountant, standardise our pricing, and get really serious about formalising safe work practices,” he says. “The process of getting to the point of government sign-off was a lot of work but it has made our whole business more sophisticated and robust.”

Unifone’s RBI2 rollout is well under way. Glenn is especially proud of one of the first sites, Tussock Ridge in the Waipori pine forest southwest of Dunedin. Residents there had no connectivity at all until June of this year – not even mail delivery. Now they have full Internet access, with 50% of the residents signing up in the first three weeks after the site went live.

Today Unifone is growing steadily with around 60 wireless sites and 1800 customers as well as “white label” retail service providers. Most of the sites are owned outright by Unifone, although a handful are community or privately-owned sites. Unifone prefers to own the sites outright to keep the operation simple.

The northern boundary of the network is the Pigroot – the legendary State Highway 85 between Palmerston and Alexandra. In the south it ends at Kaka Point in the Catlins.  Westward, there’s a strip right into Central Otago including Middlemarch and the Maniatoto region. Wireless hotspots abound on the Unifone network – in main streets, hotels, halls of residence and student flats.

Unifone customers are a diverse bunch. Dunedin is still a large part of the business and the company has never forgotten its student roots. “We compete on service,” Travis says. “The big anonymous telcos mail a broadband router out to the customer and never meet face to face. We make a house call and make sure they are set up – that’s consistent with our philosophy of being a local Otago company supporting local people.”

At the other end of the scale most customers are outside the 50kmh zones. About half are farmers, mostly dairy. Not only the managers are Unifone customers – farm workers need the Internet as much as anyone else, so there are numerous farm cottages connected. Some are paid by the farmer, and others direct by the employees. There’s a huge turnover in farm workers but Unifone has noticed recently they’ve become more confident to sign up for two years.

Unifone is clear that rural areas are its niche. “We could go and compete for city businesses,” Travis explains, “but we’d have to take on a lot more resources

Unifone’s team comprises about ten full timers. Glenn drives the desk while Travis drives the technology and the money. Tom is Operations Manager, Chris is support technician and handles Customer Services, while Sarah (Glen’s daughter) works part time on the phones. Office Manager Viv handles payroll.  There are 4 technician/installers – Mitchell is the electrical and civil works technician, Troy and Kingsley are field techs based in Dunedin, and John is the field tech based in Balclutha.

Unifone has three years of growth ahead with existing contracts. It also hopes to win a part in RBI2a – the next iteration of government funding. Whether that happens or not, the business is humming along and the future looks bright.

Bidding For Bulls On Broadband

Julene and Garry McCorkindale have been customers of Unifone from early days – way back before the merger with Rivernet. Nowadays their Simmental bull stud boasts a variable speed wireless router in the stock handling yard. Its configured at a low speed for most of the year, but as sale time nears it is ramped up. That allows the sale to be live streamed, and potential buyers from afar to bid remotely by contacting their stock agent on site over Facetime or Messenger services.

“With high speed broadband there’s a whole new level of opportunity,” Garry says. His vision is to develop a fully online auction with its own app so that a group of buyers can watch live while communicating back to their agent and lodging bids.

Meanwhile, Julene uses the Unifone network to support her separate business – developing sales with prospective clients in the USA and UK using Skype and other platforms that enable all-important face-to-face contact.

Before Unifone came along connectivity was very poor and expensive. Now the couple enjoy excellent video and streaming services, from a supplier they describe as “very responsive.”

unifone.net.nz

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Velocitynet – A WISP profile by Ernie Newman.

Velocitynet owner Trevor Fulton is a natural inventor. He invented a cordless jug and cordless iron many years ahead of Kambrook. Nowadays he’s focused on beating mainstream national phone companies to the gun by offering Southlanders, and others, a superior broadband service.

 

Trevor’s very obviously a Southlander – you’ve only got to hear him roll his tongue round a term like “broadband router” to work that out. But his heritage is Scots. His laid back, easy style and ready sense of humour seem absolutely at home in the crisp but bitterly cold southern winter.

Having retired at a young age in 2011, as a qualified electrician with a successful alarm installation and monitoring business, Trevor hit on the idea of a wireless ISP covering rural Southland. He learned about WISP services and technology over the Internet, went back for some university training, and visited several WISPs around the regions of New Zealand to pick their brains. Armed with those practical insights, and after practicing by connecting his home to his office, he started Velocitynet.

Put like that, it all sounds so easy.

For about three years Velocitynet grew slowly, somewhere on the cusp between a hobby and a serious business. Then in 2014 Trevor was joined by Nigel Ferguson, previously a senior network engineer with the Southland District Council. “That’s when we started getting seriously commercial,” Trevor says. “I hadn’t really known what I was doing – I was copying others and off the Internet and hoping for the best. Nigel brought serious engineering expertise from his role at the Council.”

Velocity’s first wireless site was at Forest Hill near Winton, close to Trevor’s home. A tv station had occupied the site but gone out of business, so Velocity joined with a local technology business to take the site over. Meanwhile Velocity did a deal to buy fibre bandwidth from a local school, long before the Ministry of Education came up with the same idea and officially sanctioned it.

From there it was all forward progress. Trevor became adept at building wireless sites. He could do one entirely on his own in 2 days, driving home by a different route each time putting sales flyers into letterboxes. Pamphlets, and the resulting word of mouth in each community, drove Velocity strongly into the market.

Early builds included the areas of Ferndale, Mataura, Clinton, and Limehills. Trevor’s inventiveness can be seen in some of the sites which occupy imaginative locations such as the roof of a fertiliser shed and on top of a grain silo. They work perfectly! Lumsden followed, not quite such a happy story as Vodafone turned up in the town a month later to compete using the government-subsidised RBI1 cellular Internet service.

Meanwhile as the business grew the staff compliment grew alongside. Trevor is clearly proud of the team he’s built around him. “Maria in accounts has been with me for 23 years,” he tells me, “and database engineer Max is undoubtedly one the best in the country.” Dennis on sales, Nicola on reception, and engineer James complete the team.

“Service is what sells,” he says – “the phone is always answered within 3 rings.” Take that, mainstream phone companies – customers from the North Island ring Velocity because they can’t get Spark or Vodafone to answer their calls. That’s enabled Velocity to sell fibre services as well as copper-based DSL connections throughout the country – Velocity goes in with a competitive quote, couriers a DSL router to the customer, and away they go.

Fibre is a bit more tricky but depending on location it can be done. The jewels in Velocity’s fibre offering include a private fibre to the satellite tracking station, a fully fibre ducted subdivision on the outskirts of Wanaka, and another under construction in Queenstown with over 600 customers. And the company has many bespoke tailored deals for individual customers locally and overseas – helped again by its owner’s inventive streak.

Put all that together, add in a sizeable data centre, and you have a highly successful business with 1500 customers, 13 wireless sites, and a range of technologies for sale. Velocity is here to stay for Southlanders and those further afield.

 

Velocitynet customer Kathy Wilson is delighted to have decent connectivity at last.
Before that, Kathy had dial up Internet through Spark at her home, and no connectivity in her fruit shop. The trouble was that her area, Ryal Bush, had one of Spark’s oldest exchanges with no plans for an upgrade, and the cellular coverage was equally bad. With three teenagers at home all needing Internet access to do their homework, and immersed in Google classrooms, that simply didn’t work.

 

 

“Now we have 100% reliability for both home and the business,” Kathy says. “EFTPOS works. We have an antenna. We’re about to connect the dairy shed as well. And the kids are happy!”

Colin Hitchen’s company Lochiel Engineering is famous for its trailers. It’s in a hard-to-find corner of rural Southland. But that doesn’t matter. Rarely does a client come through the door – most describe the trailer they want, Colin designs it on an electronic tool that turns the design into a drawing, and the customer goes on line and buys off the drawing. The image is so real that many customers think it’s a photo of a trailer already built.

For that reason Lochiel is a very big Internet user. So big that Velocity is now putting in a fibre connection to the factory, which will also pass a number of rural residences.
“I hadn’t heard about Velocity until I dug deep,” Colin says. “I was on Vodafone’s RBI1 connectivity, but it was very weather-dependent. I’m very glad I found Velocity – they are very consistent and responsive. Its an excellent relationship.”

Velocitynet

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Primo – A WISP profile by Ernie Newman.

Primo seems to be everywhere in Taranaki. Maybe it’s the utes carrying the distinctive multi-coloured logo, symbolising the fireworks that quite literally marked the start of the business. Maybe it’s the way founder Matthew Harrison, a larger than life personality, stands out in a crowd.

About 12 years ago Matthew was working  at PowerCo. He and a mate were passionate about on-line gaming. Both lived in Inglewood – a few kilometres apart; one rural, the other urban (or as near to urban as Inglewood gets.)

Gaming’s an activity where for the true enthusiast speed is king – a nanosecond too slow and you die! So they wanted to connect their computers directly bypassing slow phone lines.

They knew line of sight radio could allow them to cobble together their own connection and increase their speeds, so they started by putting antennas high on their rooftops. But in the flat terrain, no binoculars at hand, and with significant distance to contend with, they had no way to prove whether their homes could see each other.

So they each clambered onto their rooftops and at the appointed time lit rockets left over from Guy Fawkes. They found they did have a line of sight connection at the achievable altitude. Game on!

Their indoor antennas did the job just perfectly. That part is not rocket science – there’s an old joke about using household woks for connectivity.

However, the fireworks had attracted the curiosity of neighbours who, in broadband-starved Taranaki, wanted in. Then the daughter of a neighbour from further afield enquired and was given a connection too. Almost by accident, Taranaki had a new telecommunications provider.

Meanwhile Matthew had left PowerCo to work in a local computer shop where he came to realise that a huge number of Taranaki people were craving better broadband. A mate was working for Inspire.net – the doyen of New Zealand’s WISPs – so Inspire let Primo resell its connectivity, initially across four ADSL copper lines. Primo went on to negotiate a backhaul service from Kordia in New Plymouth which was a mere 30Mbps but which Matthew says seemed a lot at the time. By 2007 he had an incorporated company,  half a dozen wireless sites and a brand.

Eleven years on PrimoWireless is a Taranaki icon with more than 3000 customers served by around 80 transmission sites. It offers a choice of, fibre (where available), copper, or WISP wireless connectivity. Centred around Mount Taranaki, Primo extends from the west coast to Mokau in the north, Whangamomona in the north east, and approaching Patea in the south, nudging against friendly fellow WISPs at each boundary.

The ratio of customers to sites is high by WISP standards – for example the German Hill site we visited (pictured) connects 180 customers which is a big customer count for a WISP tower by any standards. The Taranaki terrain is a unique combination of mountains and lowlands. In the east the province comprises very rugged ridges and valleys. In the west there’s lots of flat land but a highly inconvenient mountain that blocks line of sight traffic. Primo responded to the latter early on by building a spider’s web, starting with a ring of sites right around the mountain to serve the huge population of dairy farmers. The site on the very picturesque German Hill, with its stunning views, is pivotal to this.

Primo has been awarded a significant contribution from the government to upgrade sites and expand coverage as part of the Rural Broadband Initiative. They started building and upgrading sites within days of the contract being awarded in August 2017, way earlier than the big cellphone companies who a year later are still at the planning stage. An expanded list of new users has since been put on the table, and Primo is quietly confident of gaining a whole lot more customers on the back of its strong performance with the earlier round.

Walk into the Molesworth Street office and you get the sense of a happy, capable, friendly team. There’s a lot of laughter. Many are old friends of Matthew, or friends of other staff. Total headcount is around 16 people – two in management, three each in helpdesk, installation, accounts and back office, and one in HR. There’s also a handful of part timers.

“I came from a job doing night fills at The Warehouse but this is so much more rewarding – I do tech work, troubleshooting, inbound calls from customers and emails. Now and then I get to go out on a job if extra hands are needed. There’s been a huge amount to learn but the team helped me a lot in the early days.”

 

Finding the technical people with the versatility to run the business is a challenge. “WISPs are a unique sub-set of the IT sector,” Matthew says. “The younger ones take a while to train – everything is learned on the job. Versatility is crucial – they need to understand IT, working at heights, safe 4 wheel driving in steep terrain, computers, solar power, and building. The last guy we recruited was a landscape gardener who has useful knowledge when we need to build retaining walls. Safety is an absolute priority.”

“I’ve been at Primo 18 months. I mostly do accounts receivable, and I meet and greet customers who call in. The best thing about working here is getting to play with all the new technical toys – cameras and hardware – and being able use “geek speak.” I enjoy the family orientation and culture, we all get along and because we are all geeks we speak the same lingo.”

 

Primo customers seem a happy bunch too. One I visited was new customer Arabella Cornthwaite who with her family, moved 2 years ago from Raetihi to manage a 1300 acre sheep and beef property, an hour from Stratford and 90 minutes from Taumarunui on the “Forgotten Highway.” They were previous customers of Inspire.net who Arabella says were “really good,” but inherited a very slow and expensive satellite service.

“Last Thursday Primo connected our area up,” Arabella tells me. “It’s so good – we’ve used it several times already to talk to the family in both Raetihi and the UK on Skype video. We can now do the banking and receive the kill sheets each day to help manage the farm efficiently. And it will be great when the children get to school age.”

 

 

Over a decade Primo has become an icon – up there almost with the cows and the mountain. You get the feeling that it has made a huge contribution to the development of the region and its industries. It feels strong, responsive, and solid – larger than life like its founder and set for a very bright future worthy of the fireworks that marked its beginning.

Watch this space.

primo.nz

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Aonet.nz -A WISP profile by Ernie Newman
Lachlan Chapman’s ute does 70,000 kilometres a year. Living on a lifestyle block outside the Rangitikei town of Bulls with a young family, it’s not unusual for him to drive to the Bombays and back in a day – a round trip of 900km. Such is the breadth of the AONet network.

 

You need a decent breakfast to deal with that kind of workload – especially on days when the job involves leading a horse laden with radio gear up a steep hill.

 

 

The wider Chapman family are farmers from long ago. On the family farm in Takapau Lachlan found the satellite broadband appallingly bad. The family were fed up with paying $600 a month for poor reception. Lachlan developed a keen interest in the use of digital technology for farm management – sensors, system monitoring, climate and the like – he sees this as still “bleeding edge” but is convinced it has a huge future.

So in the best farming tradition Lachlan decided to build his own connection. A family friend knew about radio, while Lachlan had always had a passion for Networks. A few friends with complementary knowledge were roped in. Suddenly Takapau was the site of AONet’s first connection, just off the State Highway.

That was only 4 years ago. AONet is one of our youngest WISPs.
Serving external customers as well as family farms was always the plan, but it mushroomed. There has been practically no advertising – just a modest Facebook page. Why advertise when you’ve got the kind of grapevine that links rural NZ?

Today AONet covers a large swathe of the North Island. From Glenbrook and the Hunua Range in the north it runs west to the King Country town of Ohura, east to Hawkes Bay’s Waimarama and Ocean Beaches, and south to Rongotea on the outskirts of Palmerston North. It doesn’t always cover entire areas but instead infills areas not served by other WISPs – getting greater utilisation of existing sites trumps expanding the footprint. Customers number around 1500 with an average of roughly one wireless site for every 10 customers.
The Chapman family farms are still integral to the business. “Its really handy having a supportive family and to draw on the resources of the farms, and the relatives often check on the sites and give on-site support,” Lachlan says.
AONet’s office has 4 staff – mostly working on phones dealing with customer service. They also service a related business, ISP Ltd, which operates in the wholesale telecommunications market selling connectivity to IT and security companies. There are also several contractors based around the North Island who handle installation, development and trouble shooting. One of the latter, radio legend Bill Warrilow, was co-founder of AONet and manages the Ruapehu district developments, often carrying equipment for new sites on his back for 45 minutes at a time.

The day we meet for breakfast (Viv’s Café in Sanson – excellent mince on toast for me, a big breakfast for Lachlan) he is set to deal with paperwork around his near-complete chunk of the government’s RBI2 (Rural Broadband Initiative) contract. There’s also a site to be maintained in Hawkes Bay if the components arrive on courier early enough. No two days are the same.
Spark’s capture of rights to the Rugby World Cup are a topic on everyone’s lips. Lachlan is looking to upgrade a number of sites in anticipation of a huge surge in demand. But its not just WISPs who will be under pressure, we agree – Spark themselves will be challenged to make sure hundreds of thousands of concurrent wireless video connections can be managed without letting customers down.

Daniel Jefferis, a farmer all his life, hails from the Mangakahu Valley near the Pureora Forest Park west of Lake Taupo. In the old days his parents had Farmside satellite services on their farm, with poor speeds. More to the point, Daniel’s younger siblings used to chew through data to the tune of $600 a month routinely, and on famous occasions get into a fourth digit. At Daniel’s own 3500 acre property 10 kilometres away even Farmside was unobtainable. So when AONet became available around 2014 the difference was amazing.

“I don’t watch any broadcast TV at all now,” Daniel says. “Its all on demand. I can use the Internet for business and research as well. We’re not yet into the “Internet of things” applications yet – new apps are coming along every year so that will come. Meantime its all about the administration of the farm. All that for $100 a month.” Daniel is clearly a very happy customer.
Lachlan loves the customer contact aspect of the work – the opportunity to help people who have no other option. He is proud of the resilience of the network – during the heavy North Island floods early in 2018 one customer, tourist resort Blue Duck Lodge in the boondocks 40km west of Raurimu, was completely isolated for several days, but the AONet service kept the guests connected to the outside world.

For the future, Lachlan is looking carefully at the next generation of satellites. In time they may displace today’s WISP technology, but not yet. Its an exciting, fast moving industry to be part of.

AONet.nz 

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ThePacific.net – a WISP Profile by Ernie Newman

 

“Technology Tangata Whenua

for the Top of the South.”

 

 

“Technology Tangata Whenua for the Top of the South.” That’s how Thepacific.net boss Sue Lubransky sums up the company, the local broadband provider for the Nelson and Marlborough regions. It’s a company with a unique history, sparked by some early visionaries with a passion for the role of digital connectivity in schools.

Way back, prominent Nelson school principal Charles Newton was one of the early educators to foresee the way digital technology would revolutionise education. He desperately wanted to bring his school, Nayland College, along with Waimea College and others around them, into the broadband world. He saw the potential for the schools to be linked by fibre.

Local lines company Network Tasman came to the party. Encouraged by the late Barrie Leay, a lateral thinker with long experience in the electricity market, they recognised a natural synergy between their electricity lines business and the fibre future. Alongside Charles Newton and others, Network Tasman coordinated building a fibre link around the schools. Volunteers dug the trenches, and so the Nelson Loop evolved. Meanwhile Network Tasman as the fibre vendor quietly connected the hospital and other large users.

As a well-connected former head of the Electricity Supply Association and a passionate advocate for renewable energy, Leay foresaw the opportunity for Network Tasman, as well as thepacific.net shareholder Buller Electricity, to gain a stake in the emerging new generation telecommunications sector. So Thepacific.net was born.

Each school was given an IP address in Thepacific.net’s range. Sue Lubransky recalls this as very cutting edge in those days, though not unique. This was the era when everyone thought the fax machine had changed the world forever.

Several of those early participants had fortuitous connections to central and local government. So a year later when Project Probe (Provincial Broadband Extension) – the brainchild of Minister Paul Swain – was announced, The Loop, alongside Thepacific.net, became the only private entity to receive Probe funding. Project Probe helped Thepacific.net get traction into the wireless world.

At that time, Marcos Biscaysacu, Justin Wells and Tim Price were pushing the boundaries in finding new and cost effective solutions to serve customers in difficult terrain. Several of those staff have a strong emotional connection with the area and still play a role from time to time.

“When I joined we were just finishing the Probe contract builds,” Sue recalls. “French Pass was the last one – thirteen years later that isolated and challenging site is still there despite the solar panels being blown off in horrendous winds. We built the site to service French Pass School and today we are that isolated community’s most reliable communications link.

The next few years thepacific.net worked on enriching the wireless connections around the region. Over that time schools migrated to N4L (Network for Learning), became connected to fibre, and went through SNUP – the School Networks Upgrade Programme. Mobile phones became progressively cheaper and digital connectivity became a “must have” for students. But from day one and increasingly as the schools needs became satisfied.

 

Thepacific.net expanded relentlessly out into homes and businesses – not just in rural Nelson and Marlborough but even in inner suburbs such as Stoke where poor copper and fibre have left a gap for the wireless operator

 

 

Fast forward a decade and a half. Today the extent of Thepacific.net’s coverage is impressive. From south of Ward in south east Marlborough, north to parts of the Marlborough Sounds, and west across Golden Bay. It truly is “technology tangata whenua” – running a successful synchronous wireless network, with very low latency and a high committed information rate (guaranteed bandwidth for customers) all around the Top of the South.

The company’s office is in Richmond. There’s an impressive data centre there hosting major local businesses – just one of the adjuncts Thepacific.net has developed over the years along with free WiFi hotspots funded by local government. Head office aside, an important link is in central Nelson with its line of sight connection to the company’s Maitai site, as well as to major customers in the Nelson Central and Port area.

Chris Tews in the Maitai Valley is among the newer customers. Having migrated recently from Auckland he took it as a given that high quality broadband would be available a 5 minute drive from Nelson to enable him to seamlessly move his business with multiple spreadsheets, regular video meetings, and streaming videos.

“I’d previously been a Vodafone customer in Auckland,” he says, “but the local Vodafone people did a site visit here on the hill and said the signal was too weak to work. It was a shock. So I went to Thepacific.net which is literally the only service I can get on the hill. While it is not quite as strong as Auckland fibre, the signal is fit for purpose – I use video regularly and there’s no buffering or pixilation. The customer service has been great; they are very helpful on the phone.”

There’s an increasing trend for farm and winery customers to seek coverage right across their properties, not just for operational reasons but to keep staff in contact and automated machines operating. Femtocells (small cells that boost a mobile phone signal across a localised area) are key to this and very popular with the customers.

So where is thepacific.net going? Sue relishes the question. “To infinity and beyond,” she responds. “I love the ever-evolving technology. Moores law, and the laws of physics don’t change, but the way we use things is constantly progressing. There is a real buzz in being a responsive service provider and doing things ahead of the big operators. We do bespoke solutions; we are nimble, fast, connected, tech savvy, passionate, and above all regional.

 

“We have put huge effort into the government’s Rural Broadband Initiative. We want whoever gets awarded RBI contracts to do the job really well for our region – no cheap and nasty installs that oversell/under-deliver outcomes. We’re here for our region.

“Technology Tanagata Whenua for the Top of the South?” Yes, I think so.

ThePacific.net 

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WIZwireless – a WISP Profile by Ernie Newman

Who had an image of WISP founders and owners as geeky, techy, rough-and-tough alpha males? Think again. Bridget Canning of WIZwireless in the Wairarapa district breaks the mould. She and farmer husband John founded and own the business, but day by day it is clearly Bridget in the driver’s seat.

From its new offices just north of Masterton town, the WIZ footprint goes northward to Pongaroa on the outskirts of Eketahuna. To the south it touches Lake Ferry on Palliser Bay, west to the Tararuas and east to wild coastal beaches including Castlepoint and Riversdale. It’s rugged country and these relatively tight boundaries have been set for good reasons – the philosophy is to keep the business within 90 minutes drive of the Masterton base.

The undulating and steep terrain demands an unusually high ratio of sites to customers. That necessitates about 115 sites around the district – some owned by individual customers but most owned by WIZ. A handful have co-location – other phone companies or wireless users sharing the same site.

Frustration at having no broadband at the Canning farm 45 minutes northeast of Masterton was the reason WIZ got started. Going to town was, and remains, a time consuming activity. In the early 2000s the benefits of broadband connectivity for rural dwellers had become very plain but there was no obvious plan to roll out beyond the main centres any time soon.

So the Cannings decided on an audacious scheme to build it themselves for the use of their local community. The grand plan was to connect the homestead and about 15 neighbouring properties. Bridget recalls spending $150,000 in setup costs over two days, with the expectation of recouping this over time from twenty neighbours. However, in those days Telecom was largely unregulated and was not a friendly player – it may have been a coincidence but the moment it learned about WIZ going live it re-opened the local exchange and beefed up its service, reducing the initial potential customer count from twenty to three.

“For a time we had New Zealand’s most expensive Internet,” Bridget recalls, “so we had to go to market and find a whole lot more customers in a hurry. Our investment blew out to over $1.5 million over 10 years of growth.” Those were challenging times. Bridget recalls getting a lot of support from James Watts of neighbouring WISP Inspire.net as she fought to build and grow the network and to make the investment pay. For the past three years it has become cashflow positive. WIZ is on very firm ground these days.

Bridget recounts her story as we make the 45 minute journey from WIZ to her family farm. This is a challenging drive – usually dominated by those careering  battering rams loaded with logs that tilt alarmingly into the path of oncoming traffic on bends. Its easy to see the attraction of a session online compared to a physical journey!

Along the way Bridget and colleague Shaun Minifie point out numerous WIZ sites. Notably the towers are shorter than a lot of WISP sites because the steepness of the hills makes extra height unnecessary and reducing the risk of wind problems the Wairarapa is well known for.

Bridget and Shaun are among 5 full time workers. The company is among 9 WISPs to have a contract to build parts of the government’s Rural Broadband Investment (RBI2) project.  WIZ is very proud of the speeds it offers being much higher than the 25Mbps required as part of the RBI2 contract – when I was there Bridget ran a speed test from her home which came in at 54Mbps/19Mbps – significantly faster than typical VDSL or basic UFB fibre.

The basics of WIZ are comparable to most WISPs. International connectivity is obtained through the Internet exchange in Auckland. Snap (now part of 2degrees) provides the connection to the Tranzit building at the back of the Masterton CBD from where it runs to the network operations centre (NOC) just north of the town. There’s ample redundancy – if the Tranzit site goes down the signal can be diverted direct to the NOC. And if an individual sites fail, the signal is automatically diverted around the network via a different route.

Near the Canning farm we turn off up a long and seriously steep farm track, climbing towards WIZ’s Turkey Ridge site on the rooftop of the eastern Wairarapa.

The view from the top is spectacular by any standards – WISPs are privileged to enjoy the best views in the world often in places where few other people get to go. We pause a while to enjoy it while Bridget and Shaun explain the various dishes and panels. The site is built to last and even in the unlikely scenario of a solar panel blowing away the battery setup would keep it going for at least ten days.

Happy Wiz Customers

Back near sea level we go into the Canning homestead where a group of neighbours who also happen to be WIZ customers have assembled to meet us. They tell us about what having fast Internet suddenly available meant to them personally and commercially.

Charles White is a very new WIZ customer who was until recently on Spark ADSL. At its best it did the job but it was very inconsistent – “we could always tell when school was out or there was high usage by the kids down the road.” Sometimes the family had to set the alarm and get out of bed late at night to use the Internet. “We couldn’t have dreamed of Netflix in those days,” Charles says.

He and his wife have three daughters and noted that a limit on one Internet user at a time was not good for family harmony. “We’re an equestrian family,” Charles recounts, “and these days entries for events are all online – the girls are at boarding school and when they come home for holidays they expect to stay in touch with their friends, do homework and organise their parties – they don’t appreciate being asked to go offline so I can do the banking.”

So moving to WIZ was a huge relief and benefit. The girls are already looking at Netflix. Sky is definitely under threat at the White household.

Alan Emerson operates a well-known public relations practice with wife Adrienne D’Ath, working from their farm in rural Wairarapa. He came to WIZ early on when he heard about it in 2006. There was no broadband at home whatsoever and trying to file stories with editors in Feilding was all but impossible. He was losing clients as a result. WIZ built a site for him, the connectivity was solved overnight, and a number of former clients returned. Now the consulting business can connect as well as if it were in the centre of a major city, using Skype, booking flights, booking tickets to the rugby or concerts, and accessing multiple phone connections for voice calls.

“We had a relative visit from Wellington who commented that our WIZ connection here is faster than their Spark connection in central Wellington on fibre,” Alan says. “Its all about the contention (ratio of subscribers to the available bandwidth) and WIZ is way faster.”

 

John Canning­ has to say good things about WISP because he owns it, but when he takes off his WIZ hat and puts on his sheep and cattle farmer one you can see he’s delighted with the way broadband has enabled the progress of the farm. Among the specialist projects is a contract to supply a supermarket that wants same day kill. The animal has to be on the hooks within 3 hours of leaving the farm. It’s important to know the yield from the previous day before selecting the animals for the next day, so now he is able to look at the results online and adjust his drafting.

Flooding can be an issue, and now he gets 3 hours notice of a potential flood from a rain gauge up in the hills sending signals back to the farm over the Internet. And the need to buy stock selectively following the mycoplasma bovis outbreak has complicated the sale and purchase process, but using fast Internet gives him the data and speed he needs to buy rapidly and profitably.

John’s an enthusiast for the potential of communications technology in farm management. He talks of automated measurement of grass, fertiliser, yields and soils using satellites. A WIZ customer already uses an infra red camera in the middle of their free range pig farm for security and so the overseas owner can see what is happening night and day. Vineyards are doing the same.

“But the big benefit is staff,” John says. “Whatever their hobbies and pastimes may be, the Internet is usually a key part, so having top class connectivity makes the staff and their partners much more happy and stable – that’s good for everyone.”

WIZwireless

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Gisborne.net – a WISP Profile by Ernie Newman

 

So much for those who thought the WISPs were new kids on the block! Its almost a quarter century since Ronald Brice, along with Dave Parker, started Gisborne.net.

 

In 1995, as an installer of IT networks with a degree in computer science Ronald looked at the high price of phone services and saw an opportunity to bring the Internet to his home town of Gisborne.

Starting with a 1 Megabit link around Gisborne city, working with local wireless entrepreneur Laurie Colvin, and with the District Council as the first major client, Ronald and Dave just got on and did it. Gisborne.net hasn’t looked back.

Fast forward 24 years to 2018 and you find a thriving Internet business that provides urban-grade broadband, with unlimited data at highly affordable prices, to 3500 customers. All this in one of the most challenging regions to build a WISP geographically, topographically and economically. In its understated way Gisborne.net has probably done as much to open up Poverty Bay to the 21st century world as the completion of Gisborne’s rail link opened it to the 20th 60 years before.

The 3500 customers make the company one of the New Zealand’s biggest WISPs. They range across the economy. Dairy farmers, many of them refugees from expensive and erratic satellite services, have embraced WISP wireless services on a large scale. Many pay for their farm staff connections as well as their own to offset the downside of isolation.

Local iwi Ngati Porou has Gisbone.net connectivity in 49 maraes. So do a number of the isolated Ngati Porou health clinics, where they support video consultations for nurses, doctors and patients. Other maraes frequently take a temporary connection when there is a special event, but once the Government RBI2 contract is completed 100% of maraes will have ongoing access. Highly profitable manuka honey and foresty businesses are customers – even a commercial hemp operation.

At the technological extreme, Rocket Lab uses Gisborne.net for its Internet services at the Mahia Peninsula launch site. When it has high demand for bandwidth during a launch other customers’ traffic is diverted via Wairoa so that nobody’s service gets downgraded.

 

The coverage is comprehensive. Starting at the top of East Cape and Cape Runaway, south through Gisborne, the Mahia Peninsula, Wairoa, and west through Lake Waikaremoana and Tutira in Hawkes Bay. That’s a sizeable chunk of the North Island, serviced by over 200 sturdy sites build to withstand some of the country’s strongest gales. Most of the sites require direct line of sight to each other but there are exceptions – going through one line of hills is usually achievable, two is a struggle, and three is impossible.

Gisborne.net’s office, opposite McDonalds in downtown Gisborne, houses a data centre providing data storage to a range of corporate customers, the network operation centre from which the 200 sites can be controlled and traffic re-routed, and the team of half a dozen staff comprising design, development, management and accounting specialists. Installers (who mount the CPE or Customer Premises Equipment on users’ houses, sheds or offices) are external contractors based in Gisborne and Wairoa.

Backhaul is connected to the network here through a fibre link from Gisborne.net’s own routers in the Internet Exchange in Mayoral Drive, Auckland.

From here it goes to a rooftop antenna, up to a tower on nearby Kaiti Hill, then on to the 200 hilltop antennas that are the company’s network.

 

Resilience is key. The sites are made to last with solid engineering and high-spec materials. A typical site with solar panels re-charging the batteries can run for up to 5 years without a site visit, provided that the farmer tops up the battery water now and then when passing. Most do so happily.
It takes a lot of radio spectrum on a range of bands to run such a complex network. Ronald notes the business owns a lot of spectrum by WISP standards. “Spectrum is gold,” he says – ample choice reduces the likelihood of any interference issues with adjacent spectrum-holders which is a very rare occurrence.

The company was one of the first to contract with Crown Infrastructure Partners – the government agency charged with deployment of RBI2, the second phase of the Government’s Rural Broadband Initiative. It was one of a very few WISPs contracted for the earlier RBI1 version for which it connected thirteen schools. For RBI2 the commitment is much larger. Ronald notes that even with the government contribution the private investment required is still substantial – and like other WISPs contracted for RBI2 Gisborne.net has been rolling out the coverage well ahead of schedule. Contrast this with the three cell phone companies who are still at the starting gate.

Much of the RBI2 project is about upgrading the speeds of existing Gisbore.net customers, but there is also a substantial number of new connections who will grow the network coverage west into the Waioeka Gorge and beyond. The aspiration is to keep expanding west towards Taupo, in the first instance covering isolated Minginui where Minister Shane Jones recently announced $10 million funding for a manuka honey project.

Femtocells – small base stations that deliver voice and data signals across an area somewhat bigger than household WiFi – are adding a new dimension for Gisborne.net customers. The company has deployed hundreds of Vodafone’s “Sure Signal” femtocells. The customer gets data services from Gisborne.net and voice services from Vodafone across the same connection, meaning that their cell phone can be used to make and receive voice calls and texts from the customer’s home even it is way out of range of the Vodafone network.

The company – and its associated WISP WiFi Connect which specialises in low-decile areas in the northern and western parts of the region – are generous with data and keenly priced. WiFi Connect offers prices as low as $10 per week, uncapped with 2MBs speeds, allowing the customer to access Netflix movies all day long. For a typical family way up the coast, with no car and very rare access to town, that’s life changing.

For all the quarter century of history, Ronald Brice remains an enthusiast for the technology and the service. With the cellphone companies coming to Gisborne at some stage as part of their portion of the RBI2 rollout, he is unfazed by the prospect of more competition. He’s fit and youthful looking for someone who’s been in the business a quarter century. Chatting to him you get the feeling that Gisborne.net has a way to go yet.

“We’re way cheaper than the competition,” he says. “We offer unlimited capacity at $75 monthly. We’ve offered unlimited data plans ever since the days of dial-up ended, and that didn’t change when Netflix came into play. Its better to spend money on ample bandwidth than on arguing with the customer every month about the amount of usage.”
Very few 21st century users would disagree.

CUSTOMER APPRECIATES AN ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE NETWORK

Gisborne.net’s usage of solar power as the mainstay of its network is one of a number of aspects of the service appreciated by one of its oldest customers.

Noel Amor has used Gisborne.net for more than 20 years. As the first employee of food processing company Cedenco Foods he initially worked with Ronald Brice when Cedenco’s IT services were provided by Gisborne.net’s IT arm. When the Internet appeared and Gisborne.net came on stream it was an obvious choice to provide Cedenco’s connectivity. That’s never changed.

Nowadays Noel imports food processing machinery from Italy and sells throughout Australia as well as New Zealand. “I travel a lot,” he says, “and I can access my server in my home office from wherever I go in the world.

“Gisborne.net runs under the radar – you don’t see a lot of flashy advertising – but they have a huge coverage and have made a significant contribution to the development of the region.’

Noel appreciates the fact that if there is ever a problem he can speak to someone down the road in Gisborne who knows the region to solve it, rather than a distant call centre. “They’re still the same faces, and they respond quickly on the phone. Its good to see a local company meeting the local and regional needs.”

Gisborne.net

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