Category: Articles

[The Land, 17 Nov 2017]

Jock Graham

The everyday frustration, slow or poor communications hampering day-to-day activities on rural properties throughout Australia. That’s the elephant in the room that I wanted to study and work out how we (the rural community) could improve our communication options via infrastructure improvements or technology adaption without waiting for a big telcos or a government approach that could take years.

My findings were that small businesses in rural and regional communities are well placed to build their own communications infrastructure that can cover 100 per cent of rural areas with city grade internet services. Additionally, there are also some very useful hardware (Cel-fi boosters) and software (wi-fi calling) options now available to improve mobile connectivity in the home and farm environment.

Since returning from this Nuffield adventure in 2015, I was buoyed by the ideas and methods being undertaken in the UK and Ireland for areas that were less populated and less attractive for communication investment by major telcos. The implementation of low cost, fixed wireless solutions had enabled these forgotten areas to access high speed, low latency, unlimited data internet.

This model seemed a perfect fit here in southern NSW and so for the past two years we have established a company Wi-sky NSW and built a fixed wireless network to connect rural and regional area with city grade internet. The service started out of Gundagai NSW, and now delivers in an 85km radius of Gundagai, using more than 85 communication poles, focusing on delivering services to farms and rural residents in areas outside major towns.

The establishment of this network has impacted more than 320 households so far by allowing them access to a fast, unlimited internet service and is growing in area and customers each month. This has allowed those businesses the adoption of new business services like cloud accounting, online banking, VoIP telephone service and the new mobile protocol “Wi-Fi calling”.

It is a game changer when it comes to improving your home and farm phone mobile service as you can setup Wi-fi access points anywhere and they instantly improve your phone coverage, instead of waiting for a telco to builds towers close to you. 

Not only are the benefits seen for businesses, but it also dramatically improves the social and education benefits for families allowing them to access online streaming services without extra data charges and buffering issues.

By allowing rural communities access to these modern-day services we are closing the digital divide and laying the foundations for the adoption of new technologies to come. 

Link to article

ABC Rural / By Laurissa Smith

Fed up with painfully slow internet and a dodgy mobile connection? If you live in the bush, you are not alone.

Rural communities across the world are in the same boat, and some have banded together to do something about it, as southern New South Wales farmer and app developer Jock Graham discovered on his 2015 Nuffield farming scholarship.

Funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation, his study took the livestock and cropping farmer from Coolac near Gundagai to the UK and Ireland, France, China, Switzerland and Canada.

Mr Graham said rural communities in the UK and Ireland had developed their own networks to overcome communication problems.

“It entails having a very long network that can travel long distances at the least cost,” he said.

“Utilising solar power, utilising the community members’ hills, and strategically putting things in place to get a better connection point.”

In Canada the emphasis was on rolling out fibre-based broadband to different towns.

“They reckon one of the best things you could do as a nation-building project was to connect every town to fibre,” Mr Graham said.

“Then allow businesses to come in and utilise that infrastructure to do the last mile delivery.

“They were really still pushing that as the model, and I still think if they had done that for the NBN (National Broadband Network) in Australia, it would create a faster rollout and better opportunities for smaller communities.”

Boosting mobile phone coverage vital

Mr Graham’s Nuffield study also focused on improving mobile phone coverage.

The research showed there were two key technologies available to boost service — a femtocell device or a Cel-fi device.

Mr Graham said the devices could pick up the best signal from an aerial or a box near a window and repeat it back to the middle of the house with a secondary box.

“It’s great to have an internet connection at home, which is what I’m really keen on, but out in the paddock, making phone calls where there’s not many people and not many services, it’s just as important,” he said.

“The more effort in connecting up 100 per cent of Australia, not the 96 per cent they say of populated areas, the better.

“Obviously making the networks in the highest capacity, so going from a 3G network to a 4G network to ultimately 5G and beyond.

“That’s for communication on the go, and a fixed wireless network is for the house.”

Mr Graham has since established a fixed wireless network made of up of 20 solar-powered relay poles across the Gundagai, Tumut and Cootamundra shires in NSW.

A similar network is also available in the Richmond and North West Queensland shires.

“We have control over what we can deliver, which is a big thing,” he said.

Posted 28 November 2016