Hi Everyone,

I start by apologising for knowing so little.  I realise there are a lot well educated and telco experts on this forum but that's why I have come here. To get help. My second apology is that this forum has probably already answered my question but I have no idea where to start looking, I mean 'advocacy' is such a broad search term! 

So, I know everybody complains about their internet speed being too slow and my request for help is no different. In broad terms I need someone or some group to tell me what I can do or cant do about slow internet. I don't mean simple advice about upgrading my plan. Heck, if such a beast existed, I would have bought it in a flash.

So here is the background. I live in the northwest of Auckland in a rural zone and am currently on a VDSL plan receiving on most days nothing better than 5Mbps. Often much less to the point of it just being a stop/start stuttering mess. WFH during this and previous Covid lockdowns has made Zoom sessions just an embarrassment and does place my job in jeopardy if I can't do reasonable business from home. Zoom sessions with my children and grandchildren trapped in Singapore and those unable to be visited in Wellington due to Auckland's border closures are again stop/start affairs that simply lose their meaning,  immersion and any togetherness that we so much crave at this time.  My wife simply cries after attempts to finish her lessons with her music teacher on Zoom.  It is awfully depressing and I would happily pay whatever is necessary to upgrade to the best fibre connection I could get...if it existed. But it doesn't. It seems our road was not deigned worthy enough to receive such expensive technology and while I understand the economic reasons for this it is heartbreaking when the alternative is almost as good as nothing.

We are 7km from our nearest exchange and my understanding is that for distance on copper wire, 5Mbps is about all you could expect. We have lived on this road for 23 years but of course more people have shifted in and more subscribers are using these old lines now. One Chorus technician who has looked after lines in this area for many years said to me the lines were "sub- standard, worn out, patched up too many times and prone to flooding". We certainly notice the decrease in speed when heavy rains hit. If I understand correctly, this all leads to continuous data crashes and coupled with distance from exchange, worn out infrastructure and peak time usage, the internet just ceases to exist at the times we most need it. And, we pay almost $90/month to our ISP for that privilege although I know this is not the ISP's fault. The idea of streaming Netflix is just that.. an idea. Well almost. There are times when it cooperates but more often than not it is downgraded visually in order to keep the picture moving. 

So what have I done to help myself. Well, naturally I rang my ISP but as I alluded to before, it is not really their issue but the very kind CS guy did suggest that if I wanted, I could have fibre laid to my house but he cautioned that given my distance from the exchange, he estimated this could be in the order of half a million dollars. I think what he was really trying to say was 'fat chance'.

So I thought about going rural wireless as these have been trumpeted by the big three providers.  I had been warned that a wireless solution may not be all it is cracked up to be but anything that gave just 10Mbps fairly consistently would satisfy most of my requirements. 2 Degs are even offering a free two month trial which I thought was pretty handy to test the concept. After looking at their maps of coverage, in all cases, my location was outside their range. I rang each of them to effectively say there must be some mistake or misunderstanding. I live on the crest of a 600 foot high hill and I can see the Sky Tower which is just 30km away in a straight line!! But alas, the answer remained unchanged. Rural wireless is unavailable from any telco in my location. 

Hot spotting was the next solution. My company phone does not have hotspotting enabled but the experience from both my Spark and my wife's personal Vodafone plan with 2GB data is that 4G is flakey at best and calls get dropped frequently. And my hotspot on my wife's phone only gets the same 5Mbps, when its not dropping out. Another coverage issue it would seem. So I haven't risked investing in that.  Maybe Starlink is the next solution but is that just grasping at rainbows?

Why, when living 30 km away from NZ's largest metropolis, in a country where we are ranked at 23rd in the global average internet speeds at 170Mbps, do I suffer speeds so tragic that on a really good day I surpass only Turkmenistan and Cuba at the the bottom of the world list? 

So what else can I do apart from shifting house? Who do I talk to? Is there some plan that Chorus release publicly the might suggest fibre is coming to our street in the next two months, (yes 😁) or more likely that it is never coming to our street so long as there is still heat in the Sun 😯?  Is there an advocacy group who take these sorts of issues to our parliamentarians in some organised and larger scale way? Or do I prepare a case to present to my local MP?

My wife is under enormous stress at the moment since we cannot see our family in Wellington and the internet just sux for zoom so we are effectively cut off. Yes of course we 'Whats App' everyday but you know what I mean. The internet is important to everyone's lives at the moment and it just seems so unfair that so much of the country has been satisfied to one degree or another in this regard while we seem to languish in the third world. 

I'm sure you can sense my frustration and it is born out of confinement and uncertainty, a sense of unfairness and helplessness. I sense there is no answer except it is what it is, andno one can really help,  but it doesn't make it any easier. 

Thanks for listening guys and any suggestions for either advocacy or technical solutions would be appreciated 🙂 

Cheers

Terry