I see in the National Business Review that property developer Peter Yealands plans to install optical fibre in a new project near Havelock by the Marlborough Sounds.

(Note to NBR: "1000 MB" is probably better written as "1Gbps" or even "1 Gigabit per second" instead - and why not say "network" instead of "high speed information and communication system"?)

That's all good stuff - kudos to the developer, which obviously understands what people in 2006 want.

However, putting good networking infrastructure into new housing projects is one of those blindingly obvious things that should not generate column centimetres in the media anymore. The optical fibre network should go in there together with other utilities like water, electricity, and gas. The houses themselves should be wired up with gigabit Ethernet inside.

What about the added cost though? Well, fibre is actually cheap. Copper on the other hand has shot up in price - just check out how much it costs to rewire the electricity mains for a house now.

The long and short of all this is that with a fat optical pipe to the outside world, you don't need to put in a copper networks for last-millennium phone and DSL service. I don't know if Peter Yealands is brave enough to Just Say No To Copper, but they should.

In fact, property developers should be encouraged to avoid copper completely. How about if councils around the country put into their development plans that no new copper plant can be rolled out, only fibre-optic - or a similar, high-speed capable networking technology?

A scheme to upgrade the copper network in older areas to fibre should also be devised by planners. If we can commit lots of money to "undergrounding" power lines for largely aesthetic reasons, why can't we start work on modernising the country's communications infrastructure?

Going back to the Marlborough Sounds, before anyone gets too excited about the prospect of 1Gbps connectivity and rushes off to plonk down a deposite on a Yealands house, remember the local network has to connect to the rest of the world. I'd be surprised if ThePacific.Net which apparently is the ISP partner has 1Gbps national connectivity, or international bandwidth anywhere near that level. Still, it's an encouraging development, literally.