'Government doesn't really know what's going on'- rural ISP boss after warship blocked signals
HMAS Canberra.
Photo:
AFP
A Taranaki internet provider says the government is failing rural New Zealanders by not responding properly to one of last week's internet outages, in particular one caused by a visiting Australian warship.
Interference from the HMAS Canberra
took out internet and radio services
in Taranaki and Marlborough on Wednesday as it sailed into Wellington.
Matthew Harrison, managing director of Taranaki Broadband company Primo, said the outage began in the early hours of the morning.
"I was quite happily asleep - most people would be at two o'clock in the morning - but [our] alert systems went absolutely nuts with a lot of our access points all going offline and rebooting, and then [staff] raised the alarm to me."
While their systems were back online quickly, as the ship continued southwards, it took out other areas, Harrison said.
"The poor guys down in Marlborough and Blenheim, it was parked off the coast for most of the day, and it just sat there doing the same thing to them."
Harrison said the systems acted as expected - to "vacate channels" for military or aviation radar. But he said internet and phone providers had been asking for years for the spectrum to be increased so different groups were not forced to share frequencies.
"Everything that we use for WiFi and mobile coverage and all of that sort of stuff is all using a radio spectrum, and there's only a finite amount that can be shared out for everybody to use…
"We've been asking for our own spectrum around this for a long time now, and it's not been forthcoming. And now this is a prime example of what can happen when we're not… afforded the same spectrum as what some of the bigger players may be like, you know, Starlink and Spark and those sort of guys."
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on
Morning Report
on Monday that Defence Minister Judith Collins ]https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/563510/judith-collins-looking-into-how-australian-warship-was-able-to-knock-parts-of-new-zealand-offline-luxon would be looking into it].
"It seems like the government doesn't really know what's going on," Harrison said.
"It's not the fact that, you know, we were taken offline. It's the fact that we don't have spectrum to avoid this happening… the more spectrum that we have, the less likely this is going to happen in the future."
He said it should be the job of Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith to sort out, not Collins.
Goldsmith told RNZ last week he would be discussing the incident with officials.
The blackout came the same week "human error"
knocked out fibre-based internet to much of the lower North Island
.
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