“Good grief, it’s almost March,” I said to the person on the other end of the phone as it cut out and went blank. I never even flinched. I never rolled my eyes, sighed, or even swore out loud in the security and solitude the motor vehicle affords in times of frustration. No, as the car was bunted offline by a significant deformation in the road surface, I simply summoned up my digital assistant to call the person back.

The cool thing about the level of degradation our infrastructure enjoys today is that we picked up the conversation at the precise sentence we’d been at when we were rudely cut off.

Funnily enough, we’d been talking about the Cook Strait ferries when our discussion petered out. Imagine if I’d actually been heading for the ferries on a day they also chose to also break down. What a trifecta! No comms, stuffed road, ‘stink’ boat.

Attempting to contextualise our entire sorry situation against the nation’s need to be prepared and ready for the approaching renaissance of land-based transport might well induce hyper-ventilation. But it’s no use worrying; where we are is entirely of our own doing. Nations are made up of individuals, and individuals make choices. We live in times where the public focus is on things like the sign at the front of the toilet designating who is allowed to use it, rather than crap spilling from the pipes out back into the streets or harbour.

There’s one fact I omitted from my sorry saga of infrastructural communication deficiency. I was well under 80km from the centre of our nation’s biggest city when my call dropped out. The truth is there are three known locations where phone calls go west between my hometown of Thames and the foot of the Bombay Hills to the South of Auckland. And, by crikey, we’re not alone. We were doing a story the other week, and I was up on SH31 Dairy Flat. I needed to send a text and attach a photo, so I pulled over only to find 3G network availability staring back at me. In fact, it was 3G until the SH1-SH31 junction, about 30km from the Auckland CBD at most.

Ask truck drivers and anyone who travels the nation’s once proud highways, and they will tell you just how bad cellular coverage is. Disgusting is a word that doesn’t come close to conveying its woefulness.

Vehicle OEMs are well into releasing a new wave of alternatively propelled and connected vehicles, and yet there’s no infrastructural preparedness for them the world over.

I’m no fan of governmental ownership and operation of anything that needs to function efficiently. Governments do, however, need to set the scene and rules of the playing field so the doers can do. They also need to protect the sovereignty of the nation’s core requirements. Having said that, we are known for handing such responsibilities to overseas parties.

Holding that thought, Elon’s coming to the rescue on the cellular comms front. One local provider has done a deal with Star Link to fix our communication woes and make geographical location issues a thing of the past by 2025. At a level … ‘Hallelujah!’, problem solved.

Yet, as we’ve witnessed this week with NewsHub, big overseas entities don’t care much about any moral and social responsibility in a small South Pacific island nation. I’ll grant you ownership and structure are incomparable in the two examples, as is the relevance of the product, meaning global digital comms versus legacy TV – windscreen versus rear view … all that stuff.

However, my problem in all this is we’ve had over a third of a century to have full geographical coverage for cellular and data. Even a simple person would agree that in the context of national supply-chain requirements and wealth creation, full coverage along SH1 to SH8 and the main trunk rail line should be a minimum after that length of time. It’s infuriating, there’s no end of 5G advertisements, yet swathes of the nation still languish in 3G.

We’ve had over 100 years to reach a point where our roading infrastructure is ready for the next progression, yet it’s abysmally ill-prepared, and here we are in 2023 with an inter-island ferry service only Chad would be proud to call their own.

I guess if you don’t understand the mechanisms providing your comfort, only your eventual discomfort will teach you.

All the best

Dave McCoid
Editorial Director