Rural broadband problem we're not talking about
We’ve all heard about the digital divide — how disadvantaged New Zealanders don’t have the same access to broadband as their better-off neighbours.
We also know about the rural-urban digital divide. People who live outside the UFB fibre areas have fewer options, and none are as good as fibre. Rural New Zealanders often pay more, for inferior broadband. Many are covered by the Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI).
There’s another digital divide we hear about less often: the performance gap between two classes of Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) customers.
Fixed wireless rural broadband
Fixed wireless broadband serves most RBI customers.. It may not be as good as fibre, but on a good day the service isn’t bad. When it works well, RBI customers can see speeds that are more than adequate for most applications. That includes streaming high resolution video.
The problem is that some people, those on the wrong side of New Zealand’s third digital divide, never have good broadband days. Not ever.
It’s a complex topic, but here’s a simplified explanation for non-engineers.
Vodafone and Spark mainly use 4G mobile technology for their first-generation RBI towers. This is often called RBI1.
Carriers use two main sets of spectrum. The 700 MHz band connects people who live farther from towers. The 700 MHz signals reach further, in some cases over 20km from a tower and they do a better job of dealing with obstacles. This band doesn’t require line-of-sight.
Urban-grade speeds in the bush
RBI towers often also include antennas using what might be called “urban 4G spectrum”. This tends to work only where the customer can actually see the tower. Or as they say in wireless communications circles, where there is “line-of-sight”.
In effect the urban spectrum delivers much the same fixed wireless broadband performance that customers will get if they live in a city or town.
It tends to be faster and more reliable, with fewer dropouts.
There are nuances. Wireless performance depends on many factors — distance, obstacles and even atmospheric conditions all play a part.
Some remote RBI1 customers are lucky; others are not. It’s a lottery.
Customers connected to the same tower can see a huge difference in performance. While some nearby users can enjoy Netflix, others farther away may struggle to send an email.
Network overload and shared bandwidth
A second, related problem, is that carriers engineered and managed their RBI towers to cope with the levels of demand they saw before the Covid-19 lockdown. This included limiting the number of connections on a tower so that users get a reasonable experience and managing download limits to minimise congestion.
Fixed wireless bandwidth is shared among users. When too many connect at once, there isn’t enough bandwidth to go around. Managing this requires a careful balancing act. The calculations used to manage customer and download numbers date from before the lockdown. Since the lockdown, broadband demand has risen dramatically.
That means towers that once coped are now under pressure. Rural broadband can't scale to meet increased demand the way fibre can.
We don’t hear much about the gulf between RBI1 users connected to the same tower — but the problems are real. Fixing it won’t be easy.
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