Business North May 2021

12 | StrataNet will have completed 23 towers in Northland in the next six months, followed by another 25 towers in Auckland over the next two years. “Through the work we’re doing we will be providing people with competitively priced high speed/high quality internet services where previously they had none.” StrataNet Helping rural NZ get up to speed T T Richard Loader REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT T he United Nations has declared that access to the internet is a basic human right, enabling people to enjoy their ‘rights to freedom of expression and opinion’. For the vast majority of Kiwis, the ability to interact with family, friends and the general outside world from the luxury of their homes or places of work through electronic devices is indeed a basic right taken for granted. Emails are sent and received, Facebook keeps us apprised of friends and family, movies are streamed, Zoom meeting are con- ducted from our home offices, and knowledge — both true and not so true — comes through the pipeline. Yet in New Zealand, through hard to access places, challenging terrains and remote rural locations a section of New Zealanders do not currently benefit from all this lovely technolo - gy. They are in essence ‘the disaffected’. And that is where Auckland based IT tele- communications specialist StrataNet Ltd and the Crown’s Rural Broadband Initiative 2 (RBI2) project enters the picture. In 2017, Crown Infrastructure Partners (CIP) assessed that 90,000 rural households and businesses could not access broadband speeds of at least 20 Mbps (mega bits per second) download. The RBI2 programme aims to reduce that as much as possible. While CIP has partnered with Spark, Voda- fone and 2Degrees to provide RBI2 coverage to most rural households and businesses unable to access high speed internet, it has also partnered with nine regional Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs), throughout the country, of which StrataNet is one. The product of two companies, one of which was IT support company Strata Networks Ltd, StrataNet started life in 2011 born out of the frustration with the quality of internet that was being made available to residential and commercial customers at the time. At the helm of StrataNet is Managing Director Ryan Newman. Passionate about the business of helping communities access very high quality internet, Ryan says the core of StrataNet is internet and connectivity. “One of the first rural communities we assisted with better internet quality was Kaipara Hills in the middle of farmland where they had next to nothing — virtually dial-up and we were giving customers access to 10 and 15Mbps plans back in 2011. We just like making a difference to communities that have been left behind.” Located in Auckland’s North Shore, Stra- taNet operates from the rural township of Cleveland, previously known as Wairoa South, and by the time it completes the RBI2 project will have moved up to Kaitaia in Northland. “We were awarded the RBI2 project from the Crown at the beginning of 2019 and that will continue to 2023. In essence we’re build- ing towers to support end users. The Crown gave us a portfolio of customers across all of Auckland and Northland who have poor inter- net connectivity — under five Mbps.” While StrataNet is creating a network and building the infrastructure to connect and support customers at a minimum of 20Mbps per second down and 5Mbps up, Ryan says the infrastructure will provide much higher quality than that. “Users should easily get 50mbps down and 10 or 20 up and soon 100Mbps down. So our job is to fill in the gaps left by Spark and Vodafone and build and facilitate infrastructure that results in connectivity for those communities and people who require a better quality of internet.” Almost half way through the project, StrataNet , with the help of key suppliers such as Powerbox, will have completed 23 towers in Northland in the next six months, followed by another 25 towers in Auckland over the next two years. “Through the work we’re doing we will be providing people with competitively priced high speed/high quality internet services where previously they had none. “For example when we went to Kaipara, farmers were still doing things manually. Now they run their accounts out of Zero and do lots of office work on-line. “They couldn’t do that before because they had dial up connectivity. So it changes the way people operate and it’s quite rewarding from that perspective. That’s what gives you the drive, when you see the results of what your infrastructure and hardware brings to commu- nities and the things they are able to do.” While 1500 households were eligible under the scope of the RBI2 projects, Ryan says Stra- taNet will be able to help significantly more than that. “In addition to the RBI2 project we are also constantly building and adding on to our own network organically. RBI2 is just an extension of our existing network. The business oppor- tunities and access to E-commerce will just bring about more opportunity and innovation and people living in those rural locations can become part of that.”