In message <20031227043006.M87348(a)bvc.com.au>, "Don Gould - BVC" writes: On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 18:16:11 +1300, Simon Blake wrote
<shrug> Stand for your council, and make a difference - if you could get 1% of the cash spent on Auckland roads spent on Auckland fibre to the home, you'd be awash in high speed data.
Now that makes sense! How often to councils have elections?
Every three years; the next set is next year (2004) IIRC. And for those that think Simon is joking, he's not. Even if you can't get any budget set aside for installing fibre, just ensuring that council ducts are put in each time the road is opened up for some other reason (eg, Wellington has some large holes in the CBD at present for upgrading the storm water system -- it'd be a shame if they were closed up again without ducts having been put in alongside), and some sensible approach for operators to gain access to those council ducts would make a huge difference. For that matter coordinating the installation of wiring/ducts/etc into the roads, so that the costs of digging is shared, would help -- especially if it were made a condition of any road works permits. And you could probably sell it to the public on reduced inconvenience (eg, road only dug up once in 6 months, rather than three times) alone. Some councils (eg, Wellington) have special coordination teams to help movies be made around the town; it seems to me that a similar amount of money spent on a few clueful people to coordinate shared ducts, shared digging, etc, would achieve similarly large rewards for relatively little money. Ewen