Canal knowledge: what network builders can learn from navvies

The government’s $1.35 billion ultrafast broadband project makes me think of canals.

No, not the “far canal” most of us refer to when discovering a goat has kicked over one of the beehives, the canals that once crisscrossed Britain, slowly but reliably carrying silverware from Sheffield, Manchester from, well, Manchester and coals both to and from Newcastle.

Great Britain made magnificent canals. They built canals from one end of the country to the other. They bored canals through hills and suspended canals over valleys on cast iron viaducts. Thousands of clever

Englishmen built canals so wondrous and so perfect, as canals go, that they kept building them for 100 years after other clever Englishmen started building railways.

Just as railway lines eclipsed canals, wireless internet options like 4G cellular and WiMax could eclipse the fibre optic cable at the centre of the government’s $1.35 billion ultrafast broadband project.

The last major canal development in the UK happened as recently as the 1980s, when the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation Canal was enlarged to allow bigger European cargo barges to use it.

Confoundingly for Kevin Costner fans, even though they built it, the European cargo barges never came. Today, canals carry very little other than enthusiasts in badly decorated and poorly heated floating garden sheds, arguing with their wives about whose turn it is to get out in the rain and shove open the next lock.

Anyway. I think about canals and railways when I’m trying to get information into my phone or tablet (which to make the metaphor clear, I will call my train) while the government and telecommunications industry seems to be focused on getting data to my door.

It’s not just about tweeting from the bath though. As someone working in advertising, a lot of what I do centres around video content, and I don’t think that’s going to change. Making it, anywhere from a mountaintop in Queenstown to an animation suite in Ponsonby. Then sharing it, quickly and in glorious high definition with clients who could be anywhere in New Zealand or the world.

Need more than fixed fibre
For this to work the way I need it to over the next 25 years – and I mean really work, not just work in a low res, watch the progress bar kind of way – I’m going to need more than fixed fibre – if I’ll need it at all. I’m going to need mobile broadband that works just as well and as fast. And then I’m going to need that awesomely fast New Zealand network to connect me to the clients, that in 25 years’ time, my agency will surely have all corners of the globe.

So yes, build the canals by all means. Build them quickly and make them great. But don’t ignore what happens where the network ends. If we do, we may build an excellent canal, but risk completely missing the boat.

Vaughn Davis is the founder of advertising and social media agency The Goat Farm. Email: vaughn@tgf.co.nz