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No UFB for me

25 March 2013

I'm lucky enough to live in one of the towns where the streets are paved with fibre.

Tokoroa was chosen to be one of the first roll-out points for the country's ultra-fast broadband (UFB) initiative and for months now, workers have been digging the streets, thrusting and laying fibre and preparing to deliver mind-boggling data-rates to residents.

Given that I regularly grit my teeth as I wait for ages as my YouTube videos trickle their way to the USA at the paltry upload speeds offered by an ADSL connection, you'd think that I'd be over the moon about the fact that the UFB is now within my grasp.

And now Telecom has announced that (finally) it will be signing its customers up to the UFB service if they want it.

So why won't *I* be enjoying UFB speeds?

Well that's quite simple...

I live in rented accommodation.

Even worse, this rented house is on the market so my tenure here is decidedly uncertain and likely to be rather short.

This precludes any chance of getting access to the UFB service for two reasons:

Firstly, the landlord/owner doesn't want their driveway dug up in order to have fibre laid, especially considering that it's a long concreted driveway and we're on a back-section.

Secondly, even if I did get the landlord's permission and paid the hefty sum required to get my "fibre to the home", I could find myself facing a "21 days to vacate" notice in the wake of a sale -- meaning all that money I'd spent would be down the tubes.

Unfortunately, given that this town has a high level of "poor" residents, the chances of finding any rental accommodation where either the previous tenant or the landlord has forked out the cash to have a UFB connection installed is decidedly remote.

Maybe in a few years time UFB connections to rental properties will start to become commonplace but in the meantime, UFB is about 35m out of reach for myself and a huge percentage of others who are forced to rent a home.

Given the rapidly falling rates of home ownership in this country, has the government really thought through the UFB and factored this into the anticipated uptake rates?

I suspect not.

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