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To Metz, getting internet to the Chathams, an effort of which she is enormously proud, is part of a bigger picture about why the internet matters to rural areas, where the RCG has installed 3G and 4G everywhere from Puketapu to Milford Sound. “Rural New Zealanders have welcomed us with open arms because they know better than anyone else how difficult it is to live without connectivity. In this day and age where everything is being pushed more and more online, they feel really vulnerable,” she says. “It’s a big divide if you’re not part of [the internet],” the organisation’s CEO, John Proctor, agrees. After working in the Cook Islands, he feels sharply aware of how much isolated communities are shaped by their access to the rest of the world. “I love what we do, because we’re giving people a choice about how they connect,” he says.
But even with millions of dollars of public and private funding, making the internet available to people in remote areas is a technical feat. The RCG develops a custom solution for each location where they install connections. On the Chathams, five steel cell towers, as well as satellite dishes, had to be carried across the ocean and set up around the island. The structures look a little absurd, massive smooth discs perched above paddocks piled with craypots and dark, shallow lakes caked by tussocks.
But the important thing is that this infrastructure works. It’s all wireless: if you’re making a video call from the Chathams to mainland New Zealand for instance, your phone connects to the nearest cellphone tower, where the linked satellite dish sends the signal 36,000 kilometres into space, connecting with the EUTELSAT 172B satellite, which sends the signal to the exchange in Wellington, where the signal is then transmitted through the internet service provider, relayed through wires and cables until it connects to the other person’s phone.
On the well-connected mainland, by contrast, once the signal from your device reaches the cellphone tower or wifi router, the signal moves through the internet’s physical infrastructure: cables running on land and under the ocean, making binary pulses of electricity appear in a dynamic arrangement of pixels on a screen.
To Metz, getting internet to the Chathams, an effort of which she is enormously proud, is part of a bigger picture about why the internet matters to rural areas, where the RCG has installed 3G and 4G everywhere from Puketapu to Milford Sound. “Rural New Zealanders have welcomed us with open arms because they know better than anyone else how difficult it is to live without connectivity. In this day and age where everything is being pushed more and more online, they feel really vulnerable,” she says. “It’s a big divide if you’re not part of [the internet],” the organisation’s CEO, John Proctor, agrees. After working in the Cook Islands, he feels sharply aware of how much isolated communities are shaped by their access to the rest of the world. “I love what we do, because we’re giving people a choice about how they connect,” he says.
But even with millions of dollars of public and private funding, making the internet available to people in remote areas is a technical feat. The RCG develops a custom solution for each location where they install connections. On the Chathams, five steel cell towers, as well as satellite dishes, had to be carried across the ocean and set up around the island. The structures look a little absurd, massive smooth discs perched above paddocks piled with craypots and dark, shallow lakes caked by tussocks.
But the important thing is that this infrastructure works. It’s all wireless: if you’re making a video call from the Chathams to mainland New Zealand for instance, your phone connects to the nearest cellphone tower, where the linked satellite dish sends the signal 36,000 kilometres into space, connecting with the EUTELSAT 172B satellite, which sends the signal to the exchange in Wellington, where the signal is then transmitted through the internet service provider, relayed through wires and cables until it connects to the other person’s phone.
On the well-connected mainland, by contrast, once the signal from your device reaches the cellphone tower or wifi router, the signal moves through the internet’s physical infrastructure: cables running on land and under the ocean, making binary pulses of electricity appear in a dynamic arrangement of pixels on a screen.