Christchurch City Council-owned broadband company Enable Networks will spend another $36 million and will seek $500 million of government funding to deliver its fibre optic network to every city household.

The $500 million of funding would be sought from the government’s $1.5 billion broadband fund.

A recent function in Christchurch hosted by Enable Networks (formerly Christchurch City Networks) was the occasion of much mutual congratulation by those on the city’s quango cocktail network.

Enable Networks chairman Bill Luff gave fulsome praise to the architect of the venture, Bruce Irvine, formerly a Deloitte accountant and now chairman of Christchurch City Holdings, the investment arm of the city council.

Mr Luff claimed the fibre network would future proof the city for 50 to 100 years.

It was driven by the example of the council’s ownership of the Orion electricity lines monopoly. Mr Luff said the network could have unforeseen applications in coming years.

The company aims to capture 80% of school internet activity and 90% of health provider internet business over the next two years. It also aims to be debt funded within this time.

Mayor Bob Parker told the assembled throng that Christchurch stood at a turning point in its history, like its colonial forbears who stood at the top of the hills between Lyttelton Port and the Canterbury plains and glimpsed the mountains far away.

Enable Networks has already invested $15 million to lay more than 100km of the ultra fast fibre optic cable in Christchurch. The company boasts that its network is available to half local businesses already and the expansion will make it available to 85% of firms.

A project that it has already enabled is the Police control centre’s spy camera’s that keep an eye on aberrant behaviour around the central city.

The marketing manager of Enable Networks, Malcolm Campbell, said that Telstra and Telecom were currently rivals and potential clients.

Telstra Clear rolled out its own network to a limited number of neighbourhoods close to the inner city before shelving its city-wide plans, citing cost. Mr Campbell said the Enable Networks cable carried much more information and was more flexible with regards to the applications it could be used for.

An information technology and internet media expert, Chris Claridge of ID, said that Enable Networks would need to ensure that it encouraged local business involvement or it would merely succeed in creating large highways that encountered bottlenecks at the international level.

If local service providers were not involved it would merely provide internet users with faster access to overseas providers of services like Bebo or Facebook.

He said local organisations should be encouraged to upgrade their own web sites with new services such as video presentations and interactivity.