Christchurch Mayor Garry Moore has signalled the council is serious about investing in telecommunications infrastructure in the city, saying its existing capacity is "pathetic" and that Telecom has "a lot to answer for".
Mr Moore boasts that, thanks to the city's "canny" investment record, the council's commercial holding company is worth more than $1 billion, giving it the financial muscle to make "sensible, long-term gutsy financial decisions".
He says the council has been hatching plans to improve the city's communications infrastructure for the past five or six months and that there is broad support for action from businesses he has spoken to.
Wealthy Japanese entrepreneur Sachio Semmoto, co-founder of Japan's second-largest telecommunications firm, KDDI, and a part-time Cashmere resident, has been assisting.
Mr Moore says the council will also be consulting international advisers over the next two or three months.
"We are prepared to make the investment, but we are not afraid of joint ventures either.
"When everyone else flogged off their assets we expanded ours, so we have quite a common wealth down here."
The council's assets include a 69 per cent shareholding in Lyttleton Port, a 75 per cent share of Christchurch airport, 88 per cent of lines company Orion, the local bus company, a contracting company and forestry interests.
Mr Moore won't comment on the nature of the shortcomings in Christchurch's communications system or say where he perceives the bottlenecks to be, but as an example he says capacity restraints create some inconvenience for Air New Zealand's engineering services arm. "The amount of data that needs to come down the pipes now is just enormous."
The cost of laying down a "dark fibre" network is likely to be lower than in other cities because of Christchurch's topography, according to one expert.
Its wide roads reduce the cost and inconvenience of trenching and the council is also believed to have ready access to some ducting that could assist a network-build.
However, Mr Moore would not say whether a council-owned dark fibre network was on the cards, saying it was looking at "all options".
Mr Moore says he has "seen the light" after visits to Japan and Australia that included a trip to Hitachi's head office and after touring software firms in Seattle, San Francisco and New York.
He is due to speak at a conference in Wellington on Wednesday organised by the Next Generation Internet Society, designed to discuss the Government's Broadband Challenge - a $24 million scheme to provide seed funding to help establish urban fibre networks in up to 20 centres.
From www.stuff.co.nz
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3484625a28,00.html
By TOM PULLAR-STRECKER
21 November 2005