Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Sun 24th Nov, 2013

Pity the people on Lord Howe Island

I've just come back from a week holiday on Lord Howe Island. It's a beautiful and fascinating place, with heaps of great snorkelling and diving spots, amazing palm trees (the Kentia Palm being the most well known) and other wildlife, and a wonderfully relaxed attitude to life. But Islanders have a few problems that we rarely hear about.

Pretty much all food is expensive. They're just in the process of setting up their own small abbatoir, which will allow them to serve local meat at Australian food safety standards. Fish is caught locally (outside the protected areas, of course), but is variable - some times they have to serve frozen fish caught days or weeks ago. There are a few people gathering chicken eggs, available at the local co-op store.

Everything else is brought in via ship. It costs about $540 per cubic metre - much, much more if you need it to be refrigerated or frozen in transit. Ice creams typically cost $6 to $8, a half round of White Castello cheese costs $14.60, and we had the smallest roast chicken you'd ever seen for $20. Even self catering is reasonably expensive here. Likewise, all fuel, all cars, pretty much all building materials - all are shipped here from the mainland. Mail day is pretty spectacular.

I don't know what electricity costs on the island but it's main supply is a series of diesel generators. Wind, wave and solar power are being investigated but the impact on the views and possibly wildlife is considered a downside (although I'd argue that they need to think differently; bird deaths due to wind turbines are much lower than you'd think and I for one would love to see a couple of wind turbines on Transit Hill or in some of the valleys, providing good clean energy). All power lines are underground, which I think is great, and street lighting is kept to a minimum (partly to save power, partly to not interfere with the many bird species here). The other complication with renewable energy is that there's simply not enough base load and not enough distribution to mean that the variable power supply can easily be used. Wind is OK when you've got hundreds of turbines spread across a state, but not so good if they're all concentrated in a square kilometre area.

But the real reason you should pity Lord Howe Islanders is their internet connection.

There is no undersea fibre-optic cable running here. One was connected to Norfolk Island, 700km east, but they didn't connect Lord Howe Island (for some unknown reason). So all internet connections are via satellite. One of the two satellite companies servicing the island decided to stop service, and only took some of their existing customers back at higher cost and reduced rate of data. The other is not taking any new customers. The NBN satellites are already oversubscribed - so "satellite internet" for regions may already be bad - which means that Lord Howe Island has no option for new internet connections. There are only a few satellite uplinks to serve the entire population, so link congestion is high.

What does this mean? It means studying, getting email, and even getting basic information takes a lot longer. It's costly and unreliable. You could do great business on LHI - selling Kentia Palm seedlings (which used to be the main business on the island), for instance - except you can't do it using the internet and compete with other sites on the mainland. Keeping in touch with children - most go to boarding school on the mainland - is slow and some things like video calls are impossible. So many things we take for granted on the mainland, things that are possible with 3G connections and "just work" on ADSL, just do not work at all on the island. Bufferbloat is crippling here.

The islanders are already conversing with Malcolm Turnbull about capacity of the NBN satellites and getting better speed. But I can see how easily it's overlooked - the problems experienced by 300 people and their 330 or so guests can look small beside an electorate of 100,000 or so. The pity to me is that the internet is a great opportunity giver. People can run businesses, find help, and get opportunities to better themselves (almost) regardless of where they are. My trip to Lord Howe Island has really shown how much we can take for granted the availability of information that the internet brings.

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