Vodafone dial-up chop won’t affect rural landlines
Media reports that Vodafone will discontinue copper-line dial-up internet connections has sparked some concern among farming families about the future of their landline.
Federated Farmers’ advice is that they don’t need to worry. Vodafone’s move is not unexpected and it is unlikely farmers are going to be left high and dry on the landline front.
As we reported in the March edition of FedsNews, Chorus and Spark are beginning to dismantle ageing copper phone and broadband networks, but they are not permitted – under the Telecommunications Act 2001 - to do this in areas where fibre has not been rolled out. It means that most of the copper network dismantling is happening in urban areas well-served by fibre networks.
Spark stopped providing dial-up internet connections back in 2018. Dial-up has a maximum speed of 56 kilobits-persecond, which is about 18,000-times slower than gigabit UFB connections common in most homes today.
Vodafone has only about 1000 customers in New Zealand who still use dial-up internet and they’ve been encouraged to make the change to something much faster.
‘‘To be clear, Vodafone is saying they are no longer looking to sell internet connections along the copper-line network. They are not saying that the copper-line itself is being discontinued, nor pulled down,’’ Federated Farmers Senior Policy Advisor Jacob Haronga says. Vodafone has hired space on Chorus’ copper-line network to provide dial-up internet connections.
‘‘It helps to keep in mind that fewer than 1 percent of farmers still rely on copper-line dial-up internet connections, and this has been shrinking as a proportion as more and more of them move to more reliable wireless broadband connections purchased through Vodafone or their regional wireless internet service provider.
‘‘The main concern about all of this is that Chorus and Spark could find it harder to keep investing in rural landlines with income lost from discontinued urban landlines,’’ Jacob says.
Federated Farmers understands Vodafone’s rural offering seems to be solely through fixed wireless broadband, rather than copper-line dial-up internet connections.
Last year’s Federated Farmers Rural Connectivity Survey found three in four of the 900 farmers who responded had a landline, with half of them noting the service was poor or average.
‘‘Those sorts of results helps with Federated Farmers’ advocacy with government to get more funding invested in increasing bandwidth and improving mobile coverage. The 2020 survey helped us secure an additional $110m in funding from the government to address poor connectivity in rural areas, and we are seeing that being invested in new towers as an extension of what has already been happening under the second stage of the Rural Broadband Initiative,’’ Jacob says.