I ran a VC session into Haast School last week. The session was aimed at community and business leaders harnessing web2.0 technology to communicate and collaborate. The special impact here being that Haast being so remote from the rest of New Zealand has a special need to harness this kind of technology, in order to keep the community alive and connected to the rest of the world, whilst keeping the community viable and vibrant in Haast. It was a good session and from my end was facilitated by the good guys at Gen-i in Auckland, on the 17th floor to be exact. Once I had been set up the staff melted away and left me to it, I had the Pukeko room to myself. Whilst there I took the liberty to run a speedtest on the network connection I was using for my Internet access, not the VC connection. This is the result that it returned:
The speeds were stellar! Just imagine what a school could do with that kind of bandwidth, imagine the collaboration opportunities, the multi-media rich potential of such a resource. I went to share this information on Twitter, but was blocked. I tried Skype, but was blocked. I wanted to use Team Viewer, but was blocked. What an irony, stellar internet performance in a business environment where sending e-mails and browsing filtered internet are the norm. By comparison look at the kind of performance a school that I work in gets on their Telecom connection 5.5km from the exchange and an apathetic at best indifferent,help desk who have taken 63 calls to get some kind of attention to the fault evident in these stats. The school and the staff are bursting to use the Internet to its fullest potential but with this kind of connectivity find they can’t. As the crow flies this school is 10km from Gen-i and their blistering connection. This has all the echoes of a story I posted in 2008 http://dakinane.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/limping-along-in-the-internets-slow-lane/ How many other schools, not even in remote situations like Haast, but in urban settings like the school below, in New Zealand get results like this?
