By Susan Sandys  March 9 2010

Television advertisements by Auckland power company Vector launched last week show people trying to wash cars, dogs and water their gardens with water fed through straws. The idea is to show how poor today's broadband, delivered through copper wire, is.

Vector is founding member of the New Zealand Regional Fibre Group (NZRFG), made up of 19 regionally based electricity lines and fibre companies throughout New Zealand, including Electricity Ashburton.

The companies are proposing to install fibre optic cable to the doors of homes nationwide and have applied for part of Government's $1.5 billion broadband fund to help them do this, while Telecom has also applied but will not necessarily take fibre right to the door of each household.

Electricity Ashburton general manager Gordon Guthrie said he liked Vector's television campaign so far, and there were further advertisements to come.

"The material is good, we will do something along those lines," Mr Guthrie said.

"The main aim is an educational campaign to get people up to speed with some of the terminology and technical thinking at a layman's level," Mr Guthrie said.

Electricity Ashburton would distribute its message, however, through print and radio as opposed to television, and would begin these in a few weeks' time.

Mr Guthrie said NZRFG's members' campaigns "might have a small amount" of influence on what companies Government finally chose to partner with for installing fibre optic cable throughout New Zealand.

"But the commercial aspects are going to outweigh that ofcourse, the decision will be made by Crown Fibre Holdings (Governments' broadband company), so it should be making them on a sound commercial basis," Mr Guthrie said.

He said Telecom had made bids based around cabinetistisation, where fibre is taken to a roadside cabinet and groups of customers supplied from there via telephone wire.

This would not be as good a service as taking fibre right to the door of each Mid Canterbury household, Mr Guthrie said.

Electricity Ashburton would also install its fibre completely underground, whereas Telecom's proposal involved cable alongside power lines in some areas.

Crown Fibre Holdings is expected to complete an assessment of proposals by the end of May and make a shortlist and negotiate binding offers for recommendation to ministers by October.

Altogether 18 parties and consortia have applied, including two national bids to do the whole job, one from Telecom and one from small Canadian player Axia NetMedia.

NZRFG spokesman Darren Mason said the group aims to provide open access to existing and new service providers.

"Open access to fibre networks is what many of our members have been doing throughout the country for some years and we will continue with that policy because there is no guarantee that if the incumbent telco provider was to deliver New Zealand's fibre broadband network that it would be open access, or that ultra-fast speeds would be available," he said.