Brightwater is a small rural town 10km southwest of Richmond, itself not far from Nelson. Its claim to fame is as the birthplace of New Zealand’s noted scientist and father of modern physics, Ernest Rutherford. Much has changed in the 135 years since Rutherford’s birth, but Brightwater remains a fairly isolated place.

Not so its local primary school, one of a select band of schools in the Tasman region taking part in a trial that signals the start of a tele-communications transformation. Brightwater School and its 250 students are now plugged into a big, fast and cheap fibre-optic cable — a cable that has capacity set aside exclusively for educational use.

Called ‘The Loop’, it is a new approach to rolling out networks likely to change the landscape of education — along with that of the tertiary sector, hospitals and local authorities. The Loop gives Brightwater School and 12 others in the region what every other school in New Zealand is crying out for: fast, bountiful and cheap telecommunications.

The trial involves New Zealand’s first ‘MUSH’ network (the MUSH stands for municipal, university, schools and hospitals). MUSH networks allow a non-profit organisation to become the ‘hub’ of a fibre network which can on-sell capacity for commercial use. The government is planning to spend tens of millions of dollars helping build 15 Loop-style ‘open-access fibre networks’ in partnership with local and regional councils over the next five years.

In the Nelson case, lines company Network Tasman has installed the fibre-optic cable, donates some of the capacity to the schools and sells the rest to telco companies for everyday telecommunications.
Before The Loop came to Brightwater, the school got by on an old-style dialup internet connection. Children and teachers waited. And waited. And waited. For Janice Gulbransen, Brightwater’s principal, decent communications are crucial to the ‘inquiry approach’ to education now being used. It’s not about telling children what to think, but helping them find the information for themselves.

Great in theory, but theory stumbles when it strikes the realities of slow, difficult methods of getting information. Dialup internet access — which often failed in Brightwater — meant long waiting times in the classroom that made learning difficult for both children and teachers.

The Loop means several computers can now operate in the classroom at once. Brightwater students can put their work up on class blogs and talk to other children and teachers in the region and around the world. Brightwater teachers are now less isolated from their peers and able to keep up with best teaching practices and educational advances globally.

Research shows children work best on computers in groups of three: one working the mouse, the other reading the screen, the third pitching ideas. A good, high-speed internet linking all the school’s computers means this ideal ratio of child to machine actually works.

Then there’s email. People in business take email for granted but children don’t always have access for learning. Email is a crucial factor for inquiry-learning techniques, says Gulbransen, as the children fire off emails to schools and businesses around the globe trawling for information for use in class projects.

“We are accessible to the whole world now. Our dream is that we can have some audio-visual conferencing facilities, so we can start this whole learning from each other.”

So where did the money come from for The Loop? The Ministry of Education and Network Tasman jointly funded The Loop’s first stage, connecting 12 schools to the fibre-optic cable then testing it to demonstrate ‘proof of concept’. The Ministry matched dollar for dollar the $250,000 Network Tasman contributed for the project’s first stage. To get this far has cost a total of around $900,000, with the balance coming from cash donations and voluntary contributions of services.

The Loop is designed to be open access and non-proprietary, serving potentially up to 20,000 concurrent users and potentially able to offer a range of applications, such as videoconferencing and voice over IP telephony. Two fibres in each cable laid by the lines company are ‘sponsored’ — set aside for educational use on The Loop.

Wayne Mackey, Network Tasman chief executive, conceived the project. His idea back in 2000 was to build an advanced network that would benefit schools and the local community while generating ‘non-regulated’ revenues through the lease of the remaining fibre to businesses. Don’t think of it as altruism, says Mackey, it’s simply a belief that education is a key factor for the development and success of the Tasman region. If the lines company had simply built the cable without involving the MUSH, it would have had to pay for all the installation and risk not having sufficient end users on completion. This way, everyone benefits.

Mackey says it is too soon to accurately evaluate The Loop’s success, although they’re nearing the end of the proof-of-concept stage. He hopes to one day see “enhanced learning opportunities for pupils of all ability”. He says this may mean help for those who may not like sitting down in front of a class, but may respond better to sitting in front of a computer.

Charles Newton, principal of Nelson’s Nayland College, is The Loop’s project coordinator and its most ardent advocate. There is simply no other suitable commercial offering for school communications, he says.

They are already “phenomenal gobblers of bandwidth”, and each passing year is bringing newer, more exciting digital education opportunities, which will need more and more telecommunications capacity to be used successfully. The internet usage of a typical business is 80% local and 20% international. Go to your local school, however, and this profile is reversed. Visiting the likes of the Louvre’s website, the human genome database, the virtual frog dissection site, videoconferencing with other schools around the world or downloading graphics-heavy teaching presentations is near impossible to do on a creaky, old dialup connection.

Previously some primary schools in the Nelson area were not using the internet at all but The Loop has changed all that. “There is a tremendous sense of ‘we own something exciting’. It is always exciting when you grab a tiger by the tail and you hang on like hell. If you let go, you’re going to get bitten,” Newton says.

After operating for six months, The Loop has performed even better than its backers had hoped, he says. The next step is to evaluate the proof of concept and start work on the business case for a full regional implementation, which could lead to 80 schools connecting to the fibre-optic link.

The proof-of-concept stage needs to answer a few questions. First, could it actually be ‘lit up’, meaning can it be used for the purpose they set out to do? Secondly, could it actually do things better and more cheaply than what is already available? And thirdly, was the idea scalable beyond the small number of schools initially involved? Yes, yes and yes, says Newton.

A regional rollout should take around four years at a cost of at least $2.2 million. Most of this would be spent on managing the system rather than digging trenches or buying hardware. Newton points out while it might look like a lot of money, these same schools are already spending more than that on their existing, inferior telecommunications.

Whether The Loop’s success in the Nelson region can be replicated in schools around New Zealand relies, in part, on how Newton and his colleagues sway the holders of the public purse strings in Wellington. Douglas Harré, senior ICT consultant at the Ministry of Education, has been closely involved with The Loop and is helping figure out how easily the Nelson experience can be transplanted.

He says the first question many people ask when told about The Loop network is ‘does that mean we can bypass Telecom?’. “That’s the kind of idea that people are very attracted to.” Harré describes The Loop as a “20-lane highway” that has been built across the region, running right outside the school gate, with Telecom excluded entirely.

Problems can arise, however, with the school’s existing equipment. Their systems and networks may be designed for country-lane driving, not for a high-speed highway. Those familiar with driving a Mazda 323 think a Holden V8 is expensive, says Harré. But one of the difficulties here is that the schools really need a Ferrari to get the full benefit of 20 lanes in either direction.

Harré says it is too early to comment definitively on The Loop’s success because some of its infrastructure is still being built and they have only scratched the surface on the sort of services it can deliver. Video-conferencing, transfer of teaching resources, greater use of interactive teaching — all are possible with high-speed networks like The Loop.

He returns to the motoring metaphor to describe the challenge of bringing the full potential of the network to schools.

“[For] someone who’s been walking, if you give them a Mazda 323 they’ll be very happy, but they don’t really know about Porsches and Ferraris and what Michael Schumacher can do. And that’s really what The Loop is: it’s the Formula 1 of networks.”

One of the other key issues in spreading The Loop to other regions is whether there’ll be the same level of donations and corporate generosity as there was in Nelson. Much of its success has been due to the willingness of commercial organisations to give time and money to back the project.

Take IT networking company Allied Telesyn. It has donated time to the project, which uses its switching technology to connect schools to the fibre-optic strands running outside. This, says Harre, was the first time the company had done anything like that in New Zealand.

And the project would never have got off the ground if Network Tasman hadn’t decided to donate some of the fibre to schools (although it will ultimately benefit from regional economic growth). Will other power lines companies take the same long-term view? Many are small and barely profitable, run by small community trusts. Some are struggling to work out how they will fund looming investments in ageing powerlines.

Others — including New Zealand’s largest, the Auckland–based Vector — are listed on the stock exchange and have to placate private shareholders interested in good returns on their investments rather than making donations.

The Ministry of Education’s concerned about a possible digital divide; that developments like The Loop in Nelson could mean schools in other regions are left falling behind. Despite that, plans are being made to extend the project elsewhere. Auckland’s North Shore, Christchurch and Wellington are likely to be next off the block to lay Loop-style networks.

Local government will play a much bigger part in these future networks with schools unlikely to be left to carry as much of the workload as in Nelson. The success of The Loop should mean such projects get off the ground more quickly, and a recent commitment to government funding will also speed up the process. All going according to plan, similar versions of The Loop are likely to be up and running in different parts of New Zealand within the next few years.

It may take some time before every Kiwi school matches Brightwater, with its 20-lane highway at the school gate, but this trial of The Loop shows what can be achieved when business and the local community works together.