| 31 Primo Wireless T T Virginia Wright The access experts Wireless has been at the heart of Primo’s business since the beginning. Taranaki based Regional Telecommunications Company Primo was established in 2006 with a clear goal: to give all of Taranaki access to reliable internet service and back that up with equally reliable customer service. They’ve expanded since those early days to become a full telecommunications business offering not only internet connections but phone lines and mobile plans as well, with a mix of fibre and wireless. Wireless has been at the heart of Primo’s business since the beginning and Primo will continue to embrace all that wireless technology has to offer while at the same time making best use of pulling fibre into the mix for both speed and reliability. Not just access but internet speed is at the heart of it all, together with the finite amount of radio spectrum available for use. Each point of access to the wireless network requires spectrum and to deliver good internet speeds (over 100megabit according to Matthew) to their customers means using more of the available spectrum. The introduction of what Primo Owner and Managing Director Matthew Harrison calls Fibre corridors is a game-changer as customer numbers grow and wireless technology reaches its capacity. Matthew believes the around 3500 customers Primo services through rural Taranaki should all have the same speedy access to the internet as anyone living in town. To achieve that Matthew envisages what he terms Rural Fibre Corridors which then offer Hybrid Fibre Networks. “A rural corridor is where we take the existing fibre on the main road and run our own fibre up a side road to one of the tower locations. The homes along that corridor are transferred from the wireless network onto the fibre network which is the best you can get. That then opens up the capacity at the tower locations to future-proof them with room for more wireless customers,” explains Matthew. The recently completed network at Egmont Village is their main prototype. South of New Plymouth on the way to Inglewood it’s a village with around 100 homes many of whom were already on Primo’s wireless network. “By building our own fibre in the area adding onto our established wireless site we’ve been able to take it a couple of kilometres up Egmont Road and at the end we put in a radio site which can see our tower at German Hill. Then we can do a high-capacity link from the end of our fibre over to German Hill which is what provides the extra speed to the tower site. Then all the customers that were along that corridor that were running on wireless now get fibre as well as anyone else that wants it along that path,” explains Matthew. “It creates reliability as well because if we lose our main fibre connection for whatever reason (Cyclone Gabriel last year washed out many fibre sites throughout Hawkes Bay but a stray digger can do the same thing), our customers are still being back fed from our German Hill site which has links back to New Plymouth. So that’s the hybrid network. It’s fed by both DMR (Direct Microwave Radio otherwise known as wireless) and fibre, that way if one or the other fail they’re still online, albeit at lower speed, but enough to allow communication in an outage or emergency,” says Matthew. They’re looking at building several of these Rural Fibre Corridors over the next few years, and whether you’re a new or existing customer Primo are more than happy to be your onestop-shop. If technology isn’t your thing don’t worry, you make a call and you end up with the internet or any of the other telecommunications services on offer installed and ready to go, you don’t have to understand a thing. REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT Sit Back and Let Us Take Care of Your Telecommunications Specialists in broadband, business phone lines and mobile phone plans. www.primo.nz We can tailor solutions for your specific needs and have a range of plans to suit your budget. Contact us today to have a chat with our local team.
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