Govt names winners in $14.4m remote rural broadband tender

The government has named the successful bidders in its $14.4 million remote rural broadband tender - a corollary to its $300m six-year public-private Rural Broadband Initiative won by a joint Vodafone-Chorus bid.

The contract was broken into two parts, covering 193 provincial schools, 183 rural public libraries, 37 rural hospitals and 10 health centres receiving fibre connections.

In addition, 57 remote schools will be upgraded to faster broadband, capable of being used for the Network for Learning.

Chorus and Network Tasman will deploy fibre to remote provincial schools, rural hospitals, health centres and public libraries, worth $12m.

A further $2.4m has been awarded to connect 57 remote schools and their surrounding communities with fast wireless broadband.

Inspire.net, Gisborne.net, Chorus and Araneo have been selected to do this work.

Araneo is majority owned by NZX-listed Team Talk, best known for Wellington's CityLink fibre network.

“Chorus’ existing 29,000km fibre network means we can quickly connect these community focal points and we will work with local communities to complete this rollout by the end of 2015,” Chrous CEO Mark Ratcliffe said. 

Speed
A Chorus spokesman told NBR: "We are still working through the final stages of our deployment plans and agreement with the government, but the intention is for the additional provincial schools to be connected to RBI fibre, which is capable of supporting ultra-fast broadband services - speeds of up to 100Mbit/s (connected over fibre).

"We see this as an extension of our existing RBI agreement and it would build the network to the same high standards, delivering the same wholesale services at the same price, irrespective of which stage of the RBI agreement it sits in."

Remote rural schools and other bodies connected under the sub-tender can expect peak speed of 10Mbit/s plus via fixed wireless, though guaranteed throughput is a modest 1Mbit/s.

Bad news for Farmside
The result is bad news for rural broadband specialist Farmside, the only declared candidate in the tender, and which participated in a 2010 remote rural schools trial touted by then ICT Minister Steven Joyce.

Chief executive Richie Smith last week told NBR his company had become frustrated in delays announcing the tender (originally scheduled to be decided by the end of last year). 

Farmside had begun directly approaching schools with commercial offers, Mr Smith said.

Whereas Farmside offers satellite broadband (among other options), Araneo specialises in fixed wireless broadband, transmitted from terrestrial towers.

Chorus shares [NZX:CNU] were up 0.6% to $3.38 in early trading.

Team Talk [NZX:TTK] was down 0.53% to $2.53.