The Good Life
In rural NZ, it’s not that we don’t care about the Rugby World Cup, it’s that we can’t stream it.
It was a triumph. It was a tragedy. Actually, as I write this, I have no idea whether the dear old All Blacks are in the final, or are the big winners of the 2019 Rugby World Cup.
Even after years as a professional rugby faker, a rugby know-nothing who has bullshitted his way through innumerable conversations about the dear old All Blacks, I can’t fake knowing the future.
What I can be sure of, as the world cup reaches its finale, is who the biggest losers were: anyone with a too-slow internet connection wanting to watch the tournament live on Spark Sport’s streaming service.
Since the first All Blacks match of the cup, there’s been grizzling from big-city types about the ropey quality and reliability of Spark’s service. Evidently, living in Auckland with a fibre connection didn’t guarantee value for money.
Here at Lush Places, we didn’t even consider gambling $90 on Spark Sport because, like at least 40,000 homes in the New Zealand countryside, our internet connection is not up to the job.
We have rural broadband through Vodafone. Vodafone, along with Chorus, received $300 million-plus of subsidies from the Government, starting in 2011, to help set up the “rural broadband initiative” (RBI), a scheme to provide rural people with at least 5-megabit-persecond (Mbit/s) download speeds using 3G and 4G wireless technology. By 2017, the Government claimed 90% of those outside ultra-fast broadband areas were getting at least 5Mbit/s, and most were getting better.
What the Government didn’t say, or at least I haven’t seen it said, is whether that 5Mbit/s – the minimum you need to stream Netflix in high definition – was consistently delivered. At our house, depending on the day, or even the time of day, we can get 25Mbit/s or we can get 1Mbit/s. Imagine if your electricity connection did the same thing; if the power suddenly dipped to almost nothing for hours every day and your lights, and everything else, dimmed or went out. You’d be ropeable, right? As you can therefore imagine, there has been much moaning from me to Vodafone.
To give it due credit, the company has sent, at no cost, technicians from Downer, which is the subcontractor for installation, on multiple occasions to Lush Places to try fixing it, but to no lasting effect. The real problem, I believe (as do the Downer techs), is that Vodafone simply doesn’t have enough capacity on the closest RBI tower to us, but doesn’t seem to want to do anything about it.
A slow or undependable download speed – Spark Sport said a minimum of 15Mbit/s was needed to stream the world cup games – is only the first problem for those on rural broadband. There is the insurmountable complication of low data caps, the maximum monthly amounts of internet data you can up- or download. Vodafone has two caps: 120GB a month (at $95.99) and 200GB (an eye-watering $155.99). In the city, Vodafone offers unlimited data over fibre for just $82.99 at up to 100Mbit/s.
We’re on the 200GB plan. Most months, with just two people, it’s barely enough. And if you go over, as we did this month, you pay $20 for each extra 15GB data package. So even if we had the 15Mbit/s download speed to stream the rugby quarter finals on Spark Sport, we’d be through our monthly data cap and straight into the poor house.
Now that Spark Sport has the Black Caps home games from next April, imagine if we watched a series of oneday matches or – gulp – a five-day test match on RBI; we’d be through the poor house and straight into bankruptcy.
The original “digital divide” – that is, between access for digital haves and have-nots – principally was, and is, between rich and poor. The new digital divide – thanks to Spark foisting rugby and cricket streaming on a country without uniform internet delivery – means 40,000-plus rural homes no longer have equitable access to live coverage of our national games. Spark has put the heartland into digital no man’s land.
Is your rural broadband any better than mine? Email me at myRBIstory@gmail.com
We didn’t even consider gambling $90 on Spark Sport because our internet connection is not up to it.