We can get it done cheaper, (your favourite telco company name here) will do, can do, may do… etc etc
First of all, no matter what anyone tells you it is bollocks that UFB services can be run over existing copper lines to Plateau Road from anywhere. The picture attached shows you the line speeds able to be achieved on ADSL/VDSL download (let alone upload…..) on copper – Plateau Road is 2KM from the Gemstone Drive Chorus Box and goes to 3.5km down the far end. I think the picture says it all………….
Spark cannot put fibre optic UFB services to every house in Plateau Road for $200,000 from Gemstone Drive – whoever is saying that has not a clue at all about communications – they should back that statement up with a detailed design and costings – if they can’t then they shouldn’t bandy rubbish around. It would cost around $130-140K minimum to get fibre cabling from Gemstone Drive to Plateau Road. Then the 160 houses on the Road (including a few on Maymorn) would cost a minimum of $400,000 to connect to fibre quite possibly $500,000 because of the length of tails to each house to the road level – and under a Chorus/Spark model a high number of residents on the road would be required to pay anything over a 50m mark (could be up to $1-2K per house based on other regions in NZ) – this would be on top of the $630-640K above.Even if the fibre was fed from the Plateau Road School it would cost any other Telco between $400-500K to get the job done – we estimate that it would cost Chorus in excess of $600K to get the job done……and then what…….. the naysayers are overlooking the opportunity that Plateau Road has at its fingertips – the opportunity to set the broadband pricing for the road, and to gain revenue for the benefit of the community – are Spark offering that ??? Do the promoters of Spark in Plateau Road think it would be good to have Spark in there as the monopoly until 2023 ? Maybe if they looked at their current ADSL bills from a value for money perspective they would work out where that would be going. I think they would be blown away when they compared out rate cards and voice calling rates (amongst the lowest anywhere in NZ) to what they are currently paying….
I would be very happy to answer any specific questions and to put to bed for you any bushfires started by the inevitable naysayers.
Yes, we need to stand up a working group very quickly, get the Trust up and running, get funding underway and just get on with it. The community simply isn’t being looked after – 2023 is a joke – the community has every right to take care of its own needs and use a local telco which its rates have been used in the past to fund in the first place. – Roger MacDonald (Smartlinx3)
From Jon
Question 1, not so important, but my background in disaster recovery leeds me to ask how many individual fibres are actually in the cable supplying the school? And is it only one cable?
We will seek the detail required from the school and Chorus and advise, however the fibre cable will not have any less than 12 fibres within it and is run back to the nearest jointing pit on the Chorus network – most likely a 24Fcable split into two internal tubes – one (12F) for the school and one (12F) for community connections. The fibre cable to the school is laid as per the attached diagram marked in blue. It will be a single cable containing multiple fibres (e.g. 24F) – a geographically diverse back-haul fibre has not been laid to the school as will be the case in nearly all the schools and residences in NZ. It is no different than the existing copper line into the school or any other site within Upper Hutt – there will be very few properties or key assets that have diverse feeds to the site. Once the fibre enters the Chorus network and gets to a major aggregation point (e.g. Emerald Hill Exchange Cabinet) then there will be a ring (e.g. north/south) fibre backbone connection at that point to provide resilience and redundancy.
Question 2, much more important, how are the individual households to connect to their nearest “Pit”. From the berm to the house was explained, but I don’t remember any statements on how to get from the front gate along the berm and over / under neighbours driveways etc.
SL3 will install a buried 50mm PE duct along the berms on each side of Plateau Road and this ducting will be terminated into a number of 1200Lx600Wx800D access pits into which all property laterals are jointed. In between the 1200×600 access pits there will be a number of buried pulling pits that have a lateral and y bend joiner to the 50mm main duct – the bend is in the direction of the nearest 1200×600 pit. When the armoured cable is taken out of the property it is shallow buried (trenching) to the nearest buried pulling pit. From that point it is literally pulled through with a draw wire along with all the other laterals which get to that point into the 50mm duct and in the direction of the 1200×600 access pit (jointing pit) where it is jointed into the backbone cable – the other end of which being at the school. SL3 has a detailed design that shows all these connections and during a set of workshops with each group of houses we will agree and define where the final positions will be to suit all property owners etc.
From Wendy
One of my neighbours has said she was interested but was saying that it would cost her a lot to break her current provider contract, but she wouldn’t have to switch internet provider straight away would they, I remember someone saying at the meeting that if they really wanted to they could stay with their existing provider?? But you wouldn’t want everyone to do that or you wouldn’t be able to claw back the set up cost. I guess that’s something to be discussed when the group gets together. Do we have enough people to move forward with it?
“The maximum known break fee for an ADSL connection is $199.00, and it would be unusual for folk to be on contracts that had terms that exceeded 12 months. If a customer has a contract that is outside these parameters then we would offer to take a look at it to see what can be done to assist the customer. On occasions we have paid the break fee ourselves if we felt that it was in our interests and in the interests of the customer to move to us at that time.
There is no requirement for anyone to change their current provider as we are not proposing to alter or touch in any way the existing copper based, satellite based, cellular based or any other communication system in the area. Customers have a choice and it is their own decision whether they want to shift or not. We believe the sheer economics of not moving to a faster cheaper more reliable service that actually has economic benefits for the neighbourhood will speak for itself. It would be unusual, in our opinion, for a customer to remain on a slow ADSL connection for $100+/month when they could be on a very fast UFB fibre circuit with unlimited broadband for less than $80/month.
Where people have an “@xtra.co.nz” email address, and for any number of reasons find it impossible to drop that email address there are 2 options for keeping an Xtra email account if you don’t have Broadband with Spark as it is all attached to the Security Suite bundle.
http://www.spark.co.nz/myspark/myinternet/premiumservices/security/
The following customers with an Xtra email account can have up to 5 Spark Security Suite Licenses for FREE
- Spark Broadband customers
- Spark Mobile Broadband customers with a Pay Monthly Plan
- Spark Dial-Up customers
With Dialup it’s $20 per month.
Or if you have a post-paid Mobile Broadband plan then the cheapest is $16 ($15.99) for 500MB. For this you need to use online chat to get the plan added to your mobile account as it’s not done via the app/Online self-service portal.
However, it may be a good time for folk to move to an email address that is not tied to a specific telco/ISP and there are a whole variety of different options open to people. These can be set up months in advance of any move away from their Xtra email account so that all their Xtra email can be forwarded to it. Given 2-3 months of that and their email recipients receiving all emails from their new address they coule be completely transitioned when the time came to drop the Xtra account. We can hold some workshops on this to help folk transition if they like.
Trust the above clarifies.
ALSO
Another point to mention is once we have this in progress any hardwired email addresses could be put on forwarders etc and plans to migrate to the new isp services which could be made accessible to those who wanted it. Most folks are using gmail/hotmail/yahoo. These are stats from our mailing list :
41.77% gmail.com
20.18% hotmail.com
7.57% xtra.co.nz
3.85% hotmail.co.nz
3.06% yahoo.com
2.22% yahoo.co.nz
2.01% paradise.net.nz
1.9% clear.net.nz
1.26% windowslive.com
1.23% live.com