The Speedy Sparky is a registered Ipstar installer, and the local Farmside referral agent.

Come and see us to discuss the many options and pricing plans.

Dave recently finished 7th overall in the national Ipstar certification process. Getting only one of the very difficult questions wrong, a score of 95%

We like to give our customers unbiased and free advise, and we let them make up their owns minds, there are four major rural broadband platforms in South Otago, and all have their good points and bad points.

Farmside has had its problems over the last few years both with equipment and the attitudes of some of the staff members on the telephone, but they recently completed a "Clear the air" sessions with all of their installers nationally.

Their attitude to some customers has let them down badly in the past, but things are now changing and they are listening to what installers and customers are telling them.

Farmside are without a doubt the biggest rural internet player, they have the best and most modern satellite, they have the fastest plans, and the cheapest prices. Sometimes we cannot get reception for everyone, due to hills and trees, that's were our satellite service comes into its own, as our elevation angle is higher and out satellite is further to the north. We are not competing with farmside, we like to think we work alongside to deliver solutions to the Clutha district.

Farmside have combined phone and internet packages, so you can have one bill and save money.

A Farmside dish is 78cm

For Farmside phone Dave on 027 636 01 02 or Vikki Moffat on 0800 32 76 74 and quote BCC31

www.farmside.co.nz

Scorch is very good for remote desktops and cytrix. it has the smallest dish, but requires direct line of sight to one of the ground bases transmitters, either in the Blue mountains, Kaihku, or Mt Stuart. Scorch is cheap if you are a heavy user. Scorch has the lowest latency, but has had reliability issues over 2009.

A scorch dish is no bigger than a sky dish, but looks a bit stranger.

0800SCORCH

www.scorch.co.nz

Unifone is a small ISP based out of Dunedin, and reaches as far south as Moneymore, they are very cheap at $35 unlimited data, as fast as the network will go. Plus $25 if you want a phone line as well.

Standard Unifone receivers are the smallest of all, and are small white rectangles mounted on a pole or in a window.

0800UNIFONE

Lastly our own service, we were given the opportunity to launch our own service in the south island, we approached both Bay City and Inzone to develop a cluster system, to enable us connect up to 10 people onto one satellite dish, for areas such as Papotowai, Tahakopa, rural parts of Tapanui, Inzone gave us the chance and we had no response from Bay city. Our thinking behind this project is to try and get the price down to around $40 per household for 1GB of data, and not everyone would have to have a huge dish on their houses, we could use the local school or fire hut for that, and provide a sat phone for emergencies.

So we now have our own service, that's very adaptable, we can set up multiple connections to  one dish, temporary connections for film work etc, we did set up free internet for the 2009 round of the national super-bike championships at Teretonga, it was very well received by all the riders.

You can see an article on that here.

http://timmcarthur.co.nz/?p=32

Go Tim Mcarther 2009 125cc New Zealand Champion. As Yukio Kagayama said to me once over a few bottles of Budwiser, (we got him very drunk one night on a practice day) "You have to have very big Kahunas to go very fast". Its funnier when a drunk Japanese says it believe me. Hi Yukisan.

The mechanic got a bit of a wrap over the knuckles from Paul Denning for teaching him bad language, so watch it Kevin.

We have some customers that want to broadcast weddings from up Mount Cook to internationally based families, we'll keep you posted on that one

We have several temporary units that we can set up anywhere with power, we have agreed with the Clutha SAR to provide internet and phone for them in an emergency should the require it, free of charge. Most SAR groups have to raise in excess of $22,500 for such a service.

We have had a connection working at Kaka point over the Christmas period, Customers can log on casually at a cost of $25 per 200mb, some of the money going to the DHL KP Surf life saving club. This system will be operation until the end of march. We hope to install a long term fundraiser with the Surf club when wired broadband finally arrives in KP, this could then operate all year round, with proceeds going to the Surf lifesaving club.

A big thank you to all the people that have supported the project.

Prices start at $59.95 for 1 GB per month.

Temporary connection arranged and priced on a case by case basis.

A rivernet dish is 1.2mtrs

www.rivernet.co.nz

0800 RIVERNET or 03 418 2292