I’ve seen some good technical stuff in this forum and I could really use some good advice. Here’s my situation:

We live about 20km out of Hastings (not exactly the back of beyond). From the hill behind our house we can see into both Hastings and Napier. In another direction we have line-of-sight to a big transmission mast in the distance (Mt. Erin in Havelock North for those who know the area). A major new fibre optic cable (I think some kind of backbone cable linking Auckland and Wellington) was laid this past summer and runs along a country road about 4 km from our house.

Yet we can’t get broadband. I have tried repeatedly over the years with many different providers and achieved zero result. Telecom are not interested and have been positively rude about it. We are too far from any exchange and there are no cabinets planned for our area. Kordia says no Mt. Erin transmitter (or any other) is pointed our direction so we can’t get wireless either. Whatever I try just hits a blank wall. I am so damned frustrated with our increasingly slow dial-up (Orcon at the moment) that I want to scream. Much of the time our throughput drops to under 1 kb/s, usually around 700 bits(!) or less. Our email server times out when people try to send us photos. Sometimes this happens even when loading certain web pages. We can’t stream or access social networking sites or do hardly anything else in an internet world that increasingly assumes everyone is on high speed broadband. Even software help files come as videos these days, never mind hundred megabyte downloads every time you need to update Windows or a virus database. More and more, we are feeling shut out and isolated from the rest of the world and I can’t possibly describe how depressing this actually is.

I considered satellite and rejected it when Farmside was the only game in town. They just wanted too much for too little. It’s still slow and expensive but I have become so desperate that I’m thinking about giving Inzone a try. Before I do, though, I wanted to check with some of you clever people here to ask if this really is our only option. Although I’m not a computer novice and I do have some general technical background, I frankly don’t understand much about the current telecommunications infrastructure or what possibilities there might actually be with a little creative thinking. I suspect at least some of those I have spoken with were jerking me around, or just didn’t know what they were talking about, but I also don’t have enough knowledge to challenge them. If anyone could offer any suggestions or advice pertaining to our situation, I would really appreciate it. For example, does anyone know what that fibre optic cable I described actually is for, and why it couldn’t be tapped into in some fashion? I can’t get a straight answer from anyone at Telecom.

Thank you very much for reading this long post and sharing in my mounting frustration. And thanks especially for any information anyone can provide.