bigpicture

Since 2005 there have been a series of funding initiatives that have been directed at getting broadband to schools and to bring schools internal networks up to a high standard. The most exciting of these are the joint initiatives of the School Network Upgrade Project III and the Broadband Investment Initiative. The first of these will see all New Zealand Schools have their networks upgraded to the current MoE standards (including running fibre from the school to the gate for those who will be able to use it) while the BII funding will bring the fibre to gate for them to connect to. The various projects are listed chronologically so if you are not interested in the history then just skip straight to the bottom of the page.
 * Government Funding Strategies

Project Probe (2004) This was an initiative to get broadband to the regions not currently supported by the big Telcos. It seems hard to believe that just 5 short years ago there were significant parts of the country that could only access the internet via a dial-up connection. Project Probe information is getting hard to come by these days, but from memory it involved tenders being called in various regions. The succesful tenders received money to subsidise the equipment they needed to install to roll out broadband connections to the schools in their region. The government spent $48.3M and the final contract was signed around the 1st of October 2004. School Network Upgrade Project Parts I & II, SNUP (September 2005, April 2007)** Originally this scheme was aimed at about 300 schools with rolls under 77. By the time that the first stage was completed it had reached about 350 schools a few of which had rolls up to 180. The second stage of funding covered fewer schools but they had rolls up to around 250. by the time the first two stages were completed the MOE had spent 16 million dollars completing or upgrading the networks for 463 small or rural schools. The schools who participated had to contribute to the cost of the upgrade and the subsidy they received ranged from about 90% to 50% with the smaller schools receiving a larger percentage of the total cost as a subsidy on average.

The $24 million Broadband Challenge Fund was intended to provide seed funding to improve the availability and quality of broadband Internet access. It aimed to establish a series of urban fibre networks by 2009, and to develop broadband Internet access solutions for rural and poorly served communities. The successful applicants were: sources: [], [] Only some of the above projects impacted directly for schools (eg North Shore City and Vector built NEAL) but do mean that there is more fibre in communities.
 * Broadband Challenge (2006)**
 * North Shore City in association with Vector Communications Ltd ($4,640,625)
 * Hamilton City Council ($3,290,625)
 * Smartlinx 3 ($2,372,353)
 * Nelson Marlborough Inforegion ($1,788,750)
 * Canterbury Development Corporation ($4,218,750)
 * Tuhoe Education Authority ($500,000)
 * Waikato 2020 Communications Trust ($47,000)
 * Waitakere City Council (granted $175,000)
 * WiKarekare Trust in West Auckland ($5000)
 * West Coast Development Trust ($600,000)

In August 2006 applications opened for 340 million dollars of funding that was intended mainly to get high speed broadband to business, municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals in urban areas and also to provide access to broadband in under-served (rural) areas. They received 90 applications for projects totalling 600 million dollars. In the end 36 expressions of interest were approved to proceed to the full application. You can find a full list of them on the digital strategies website. [|Expression of Interest Application results for BIF] With the change of government in 2008 this funding was put on hold as part of the caretaker government protocol and was never distributed due to the announcement of the National government's Broadband Investment Initiative
 * Broadband Investment Fund, BIF (August 2008)**

For schools the important thing about this funding stream is that for urban schools it will deliver a fibre connection to their gate. In fact Telecom have said they would deliver fibre to all schools in the North and South Islands within three years if they are accepted as the governments partner. [|Dominion Post article about Telecom's proposal] [|Telecom's submission in response to the BII] (10MB PDF file)
 * Broadband Investment Initiative, BII (2009)**

In March 2009 the government unveiled its plan to spend 1.5 billion dollars to establish a Crown-owned investment company (Crown Fibre Investments Co, CFIC) which will deliver fibre to the doors of the 75% of the population who live in the 25 biggest cities and towns in New Zealand, The 25 centres, in order of population, are: Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington, Hamilton, Napier and Hastings, Dunedin, Tauranga, Palmerston North and Feilding, New Plymouth and Hawera, Kapiti and Levin, Nelson, Rotorua, Whangarei, Invercargill, Wanganui, Gisborne, Cambridge and Te Awamutu, Blenheim, Timaru, Taupo, Masterton, Whakatane, Ashburton, Tokoroa, and Oamaru. The 25 centres covered by this scheme have a total of 1630 schools. This project has moved at such speed that it has now been put on hold until August while some of the finer details are worked out. For instance the original documents talked about providing dark fibre, but it seems that many of the potential partners wish to offer Layer 2 services as well as dark fibre. Another 48 million dollars have been set aside to provide connectivity in rural areas. While this would appear to be too little money, it should provide at least some hope for the 900 schools not in urban areas.

$150M from the BII has been set aside to make schools ready for ultra fast broadband. This has been defined as 100Mbps which will be a significant improvement for the vast majority of New Zealand schools, many of which currently have connections of between 0.5 and 2Mbps. This programme is intended to upgrade school networks and to provide a fibre drop from the school network hub to the road, with the MoE subsidising the cost by 80%. Currently 16 Million dollars have been transferred from the Ministry of Economic Development to the MoE and some of this money will be put towards upgrading 4 schools. The schools have been chosen because they represent a number of different roll sizes and regional locations. You may remember that the first two stages only tackled schools with rolls up to 250, so the Ministry have no figures on what the costs and timeframes might be like for bigger schools. The four trial schools are Palmerston North Girls, Tararua College, Rangitoto College, Taradale College. An interesting development is that they are exploring the costs of wireless solutions to complement the wired networks. Currently wireless has been counted as an operational cost (devices plug into the wall) rather than as a capital expense (is inside the wall). Hopefully this can be changed. SNUP I & II managed to spend, at most $12M, in a single year. The implication of that, is that with the best will in the world it will be impossible to upgrade the network in every school in New Zealand simultaneously. There are just not enough people who have the skills needed. Even if they manage to find enough workers to commission $24M worth of cabling a year it will still take more than 6 years to complete the work.
 * School Network Upgrade Project Part III**

It seems that some priorities are likely to be set and that a points system may be explored that would give points for things such as: It also seems likely that regions will be completed at once, rather than forever moving contractors from one part of the country to another. That is not to say that all of Auckland will be done before they move to another city, but for instance the schools on the NEAL Loop might be done as a set.
 * Who gets to go first?**
 * access to a fibre connection
 * active e-AsTTle School
 * Te Kotahitanga school
 * Virtual Learning Network School
 * ICT PD school

[|Map showing where fibre is currently deployed in NZ] [|Ministry Network Upgrade Specifications] [|Project Probe final contract signing and some frequently asked questions]
 * Interesting Links**