Wellington Broadband

Excellent to see Mayor Kerry Prendergast promising a focus on better broadband in Wellington, even talking of fibre to the home for the whole of Wellington.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the Council itself providing money, but as Kerry suggests they could make council-owned ducting and sewers available to a network partner.

There’s actually a lot of things a local authority can do, to make it easier for broadband to happen in their area. Zoning and resource consents, notification of any digging up of roads to broadband providers, notification of new subdivision activity etc. In fact one of the things on my to do list for this year is to get some experts together and see if we can come up with a nice list of say 10 simple steps for a local authority to help encourage broadband infrastructure. Again these may not even involve money, or significant money – just making sure some trench is laid every time a road is dug up helps – that will massively cut the cost of future fibre if the trench is already there.