Sam Sargeant

Video conferencing is often mentioned when justifying broadband goals. It’s a technology you can use right now if you go buy a $40 webcam or have a computer with a built-in camera. It’s great for business use as well as in the home.

Modern families are spread across the country or even the globe. Being able to see and hear your loved ones when you’re unable to be there in person can be very valuable. Recently I got my parents a new computer and spent a little time getting everyone setup for video conferencing. They live in Christchurch and while it’s only 300 km south of me I don’t make it down to see them as much as I’d like. Video calls are ideal for us.

Video call for the Sargeant family

The family home has TelstraClear cable Internet, as do I. The quality of calls to my family is okay, but has frequent problems and dropouts during peak times. If we wanted to add a 3rd person to the call I expect bandwidth would dry up very quickly. I also expect that if I call someone who uses an ISP that TelstraClear isn’t peering with then all bets are off.

A strong national network with capacity for this is the first step, however business and families can stretch internationally too.

When I travelled to Taiwan early this year I used Skype to call my fiancé back in Wellington. I had oodles of bandwidth to my hotel room, however video quality back to New Zealand was so pathetic we had to give up and use audio only. In theory our home has speeds of 10 megabit for download and 2 megabit for upload. In reality even our 64 kbit voice stream was struggling.

Recently TelstraClear used their “Next IP” network to demonstrate the next step after video: Holograms. I notice that their media-release only considers this technology useful for business. Another example of how short-sighted they are. I look forward to shimmering 3D images of my kids beamed into the lounge.

Telco hits out at National’s fibre plan

This month the CEO of our second largest telecommunications company said faster broadband to the home will mostly result in more downloads of pornography and movies rather than improvements to productivity. Shortly afterwards the MD another network infrastructure company piped up with a “me too” statement saying the vast majority of New Zealand’s wealth is created in businesses and not the home.

He was probably correct in saying that business generates most of the wealth. But that’s not the reason I find his statements frustrating. I’m a firm believer that high-speed telecommunications for citizens is going to be critical for New Zealand in the future.

I’m not alone in disagreeing with TelstraClear. InternetNZ followed up the initial news with a release of their own that said “high-speed broadband already allows effective work-from-home and telepresence arrangements, greater social interaction through video contact between family members”

I do find myself defending ubiquitous high-speed Internet on occasion. Sometimes it’s hard to get across why I feel it’s so important. It’s very easy for people to assume, like the aforementioned business leaders, that faster Internet is just going to be used for more time-wasting or simple entertainment.

So I’m planning some blog posts to describe what I use broadband for, and why I think the more homes we connect the better things will be.