New Zealand’s Farmside announced it has 10,000 rural wireless customers connecting via the Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI). Farmside is 100% owned by Vodafone New Zealand and offers a range of regional wireless broadband, satellite and fibre plans. Farmside reported that the Rural Connectivity Group (RCG) delivered 150 RBI Phase 2 sites which deliver 4G wireless broadband into rural Aotearoa. RCG is a joint venture between Spark, Vodafone and 2 degrees and has partnered with Crown Infrastructure Partners to deliver 400 new mobile cell-sites to rural New Zealand by December 2022. The topic of regional shared RAN infrastructure was raised by Venture Insights in our October 2019 Comms Day conference presentation and was highlighted by the Australian Government in its current Mobile Blackspot Round 5a discussion paper as a priority solution.
Click to see our Shared Infrastructure Presentation:
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