Would you like fries with that? NZ bandwidth costs contribute to loss $2.4b project

New Zealand looks likely to miss out on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project because of the cost of our bandwidth.

The SKA has been called the “biggest science project in the world” and would consist of thousands of satellite dishes being deployed across New Zealand and Australia to form a square grid of radio telescopes effectively creating the largest telescope we’ve ever built as a species.

It’s an exciting project, an opportunity to stamp New Zealand’s place in the scientific community and worth billions of dollars.

We miss out to an African consortium in part because of their lower costs of power and the cost of transferring data (assuming media reports are correct).

That’s right, our international bandwidth pricing is to blame for New Zealand missing out on a key role in the scientific community.

You may not care terribly much about the cosmos, and view astronomy (as many do) as a passive, unimportant science that will deliver no R&D credit to businesses in New Zealand [The MED said the SKA would create 500 high tech jobs in NZ - Editor].

In many respects, astronomy is pure science with little day-to-day business application – but just think where our quest for knowledge has taken us and the spin off benefits such study brings. Electricity itself was considered at best a party trick and certainly nobody really understood its transformational capabilities when it was first introduced. We certainly didn’t foresee the telephone, television, computers, the internet or Angry Birds when early experimenters were talking it up.

But let’s assume for a moment that the SKA and astronomy won’t amount to much of anything for the New Zealand market. Instead, let’s look at what else we miss out on.

Ian Foster, the NZ-born “father of grid computing” works in Chicago, and is used to moving gigantic amounts of data around the globe. Many years ago he told me that New Zealand lags so far behind the rest of the world in terms of connectivity that New Zealand tertiary institutes and other centres of learning miss out on taking part in global research. Projects worth millions of dollars a year pass us by because we simply cannot send the data out to other participants quickly enough or cheaply enough.

Data transfers on the scale that Foster talks about are common around the world but would make the average New Zealand user duck for cover. The Hadron Collider for example puts out 15 Petabytes of data a year. We don’t get direct access to that amount of data because of the cost.

And what about business itself? What about the film industry – long held up as a bastion of New Zealand’s innovation and place on the world stage.

What about the Lord of the Rings trilogy, filmed 15 years ago but (legendarily) requiring a man to carry a bag of hard drives to LA to screen the rushes because the cost of international data was prohibitive.

What about Weta FX’s inability to collaborate across the country with other effects specialists in Auckland or Christchurch because of the cost of bandwidth.

What about Natural History New Zealand’s missing out on a contract worth millions of dollars to film a TV series in the South Island because it couldn’t get the footage to Germany overnight for the producers to see.

This isn’t a science problem, or an innovation problem. This isn’t about the SKA contract going elsewhere. This is the solution to all our economic troubles being ignored and pushed aside. This is an economic tragedy unfolding. Instead of New Zealand being seen as the place where innovation thrives, where talent wants to live, it becomes the place where we could have filmed, could have built, could have grown but chose instead to be poor.

The SKA contract loss is just a symptom but I fear the disease itself will require us to teach our kids how to say “would you like fries with that” and that is something that is unbearable. 

Paul Brislen is chief executive of the Telecommunications Users Association of NZ (Tuanz).