Father Stanley Nield lives in a part of New Zealand that's not set to get internet anytime soon, despite extended broadband rollouts. With an eight-metre antenna, he's taken things into his own hands, but remains frustrated on behalf of his community.

Many Kiwis can hardly remember what life was like before the internet. But even as the country's connectivity infrastructure expands rapidly, the most remote households are being left behind. Katie Kenny reports.

It takes Stanley and Marie Nield less than two hours to drive to the centre of the country's capital city, yet they're among the 1 per cent of households considered too remote for high-speed internet.

If you happen to be driving to Te Wharau, east of Carterton, in Wairarapa, take a screenshot of the directions. Because after passing through Gladstone, you'll lose signal. And be warned: the winding road means the final leg of the drive is more difficult than the map suggests. Roadside rolling fields give way to dense, dark greenery. In May, even by lunchtime, shady patches of grass are still silver with frost. The land rises again, and becomes dotted with rocky outcrops and small, conical hills.

A "school" sign stands outside an old wooden classroom. Marie Nield explains it's the former Te Wharau School, which, with a roll of 13, closed in 1999. "That killed this place."

The couple's section sits atop a sunny clearing. They have an outdoor pool and a sprawling, single-storey house, which Stanley Nield has been renovating since they moved from Auckland two decades ago.

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The retired, rural-dwellers are unlikely figures to be campaigning for internet access. But they're more than qualified.

Stanley Nield is actually Father Nield, a Greek Orthodox priest. In a former life, he was an electrical engineer, then a science teacher. The couple moved to New Zealand from Lancashire, England, in the 1970s. Nield nods towards his wife, perched next to him on a black leather sofa: "She was one of the first people to teach computer science in New Zealand."

"We've been using computers for 40 years."

He's disgruntled – exasperated, even – on behalf of his community, at how they've been "left out of the loop". From Gladstone Rd, where the telephone system stops, about 100 households rely on customer multi-access radio; an antique service to rural areas where conventional, physical lines are impractical to install.

"Subsequent to the evolution of internet, we were left behind here," he says.

He's figured out a solution for his household, in the form of an eight-metre antenna on his roof that picks up 3G cell phone signal. But his neighbours, mostly farmers, either pay for expensive, slow satellite service or just forsake an internet connection entirely.

His solution provides him with download speeds of about 10 megabits per second, which is enough to stream high definition videos. To compare: the "premium" fibre broadband service is 100Mbps. By the end of 2022, the Government says 87 per cent of Kiwis will have access to fibre-to-the-premises, enabling speeds of close to 1000Mbps – that's the equivalent to the bandwidth needed to simultaneously stream 40 different ultra-high definition videos.

Before that, he had to rely on dial-up speeds of just 14.4 kilobits per second. Many of his neighbours still do.

For Nield, the lack of communication was the main hindrance. Parishioners would try to send him photos and videos from Wellington, and further afield. "If you're stuck with this dial up thing, it takes half an hour to download something that in town would take two seconds. Hello? It's not good enough."

The internet is such an essential part of everyday life, that the United Nations Human Rights Council has resolved access is a basic human right. Yet the digital divide – between those who have ready access to computers and the internet and those who don't – means those with the most to gain from digital technology are too often missing out.

"We have on one hand a child growing up in a home preparing for the space age, while the other is left behind in the bronze," Kiwi entrepreneur and futurist Derek Handley said during his keynote at Techweek this year. And the latter is being denied the choice or chance to catch up to the former, he said.

"Ever the optimist that I am, I still can't help but see a gulf the size of the Pacific Ocean being allowed to open up before our eyes."

Handley's Aera Foundation, a charitable trust that looks for imaginative ways to tackle social issues, this month published the results of a survey of 500 Kiwis who self-identify as working in "innovation". Almost 80 per cent of the respondents believe internet access should be "as common as food and water", and that access to internet at home is the duty of both the private and public sectors.

Infrastructure is one of many reasons for the divide, and no longer the primary access issue. Age, socioeconomic wellbeing, education level, gender, ethnicity, impairment, and language are all potential obstacles to inclusion. But no amount of social progress can compensate for a lack of physical infrastructure. While cyberspace connotes placelessness, its architecture still relies very much on nuts and bolts and cables and hard labour.

Last month, InternetNZ released a paper calling for a target of "universal access" to reduce the effects of the digital divide. Universal access, the paper says, means ensuring all people within a society have the ability, accessibility, and affordability, to get online.

"The internet is an essential part of everyone's life these days, and if you're going to share in the benefits then being connected is a minimum state," says Andrew Cushen of InternetNZ. While there will always be a small percentage who choose to stay offline, it's important that's a genuine choice, he says. But the divide, the disconnection, "is a solvable problem".

By the end of the next phases of the fibre network rollout and rural broadband builds, the vast majority of Kiwis – an estimated 99 per cent – will be provided with high quality internet infrastructure. But the remaining 1 per cent – amounting to 16,000-odd households and businesses – won't be covered by a high-speed network.

Improving rural connectivity has been a priority and source of pride for former and current administrations.

Early in its term, the new Government set a goal to close the digital divide by 2020. (Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media Minister Clare Curran has hedged by describing it as an "aspirational goal".)

In May, Curran released an accelerated timetable for the rollout of rural broadband and mobile networks. The new schedule aims to have phase two of the Rural Broadband Initiative and the Mobile Black Spot Fund "substantially finished" by the end of 2021, a year earlier than planned.

When it comes to who actually does what, things get a bit complicated. In August 2017, a joint venture between Spark, Vodafone and 2degrees, called the Rural Connectivity Group, won the contract to be the infrastructure provider to bring wireless broadband and 4G mobile coverage to rural New Zealand, in partnership with Crown Infrastructure Partners.

The contract provides for improved rural broadband to be extended to more than 70,000 rural homes and businesses, and new mobile coverage for around 1000 kilometres of state highways and more than 100 tourist destinations.

But exactly when and where that will happen is still unclear. The group's engagement manager Caitlin Metz tells me that prematurely revealing proposed building sites would be unfair on landowners.

I give her the Nields' address, and ask if it's likely to get coverage any time soon. She types on her keyboard, then pauses. "I would be very surprised if they would get coverage," she says.

So, who decides which areas do? In short, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment agrees on a list of sites that the group is set to deliver, Metz says. Then the minister sets the timeframe. (Haast, on the West Coast, this year made headlines for being bumped up the list, with Curran saying the community had raised concerns about public safety.)

"A lot of analysis was done, councils provided their areas without coverage," Metz says. "All areas were looked at. Do they have landlines? Do they have broadband? Are they tourist hotspots? Do they have coverage over state highways? They came up with a list of sites which need coverage, and then they contracted us to build them."

While there's been "tremendous progress" with broadband rollout over the last 10 years, some communities, such as the Nields', are "economically very difficult to try and serve", says Martin Sharrock, head of networks at Chorus.

Economically difficult?

Trying to get fibre into a place like Te Wharau would be "astronomically expensive", he says. "It's a very long way over some very gnarly ground to be able to get there." Wireless companies aren't particularly interested in serving sparsely populated communities with networks that are costly to maintain, he says.

"In [Te Wharau's] case, and quite often, Chorus is the only company that has any reach into these locations."

Chorus owns the antique phone service that provides voice communications to the Nields' property, and, Sharrock estimates, about 6000 households around the country. He admits the network is getting "a little bit old now", but still does the job getting the phone service into houses.

Essentially, it's a little copper network, just like the ones in Wellington or Auckland, but there's no fibre to connect it to the wider internet or the backbone of New Zealand. Instead, Sharrock says, "we have to try and get there via these remote radio connections".

"The way we do that is we bounce the signal from rural valley, to rural hill, to rural hill again up through the backcountry, then we drop it down into these communities.

"So it's just voice unfortunately, not broadband."

However, he adds, Chorus is open to working with rural New Zealand to try to do things locally that they couldn't on a national basis.

In the meantime, InternetNZ's paper outlines other practical solutions for the remaining 1 per cent, with subsidised satellite internet as an option.

The paper suggests a publicly funded $70 subsidy towards the monthly cost of a basic connection (about $140). In total, access for the most remote 16,000 households and businesses could be addressed for $17 million up-front (for installation costs) and a further $14.2 million per year.

Curran agrees subsidised satellite is one possible solution, but regards it "a very expensive one".

She says an additional $105 million has been allocated to expand the rural rollouts, targeting those unserved users. Plans for that expansion are underway, but, owing to commercial sensitivity, she can't provide any further details.

"An announcement will be made on this soon."

Marie Nield knows people will describe the remaining 1 per cent as "negligible". "But nothing is negligible when it involves people."

For the first time, Statistics NZ this year prioritised online participation in the census, delivering access codes rather than paper forms to every household. More than 82 per cent of responses were online, surpassing the 70 per cent target. (The move was considered a success, despite an overall 5 per cent drop in response rate from the previous census.)

But out of protest and in solidarity with their disconnected neighbours, the Nields asked for paper copies. "They've got antique technology," Stanley Nield says, "no coverage. Just try and do this census thing. Forget it."

Unlike many farmers, the Nields have the luxury of packing up and moving. So, why do they choose to live in a such a remote location?

"Bucket list, maybe," he says, shrugging, looking out the window at an uninterrupted view of green fields. "We had to retire anyway. This place turned up and it's allowed us to do things we always wanted to do."

Before the antenna went up, visiting family and friends would comment on how relaxing it was to be forced to disconnect. To be away from social media notifications, unable to check the latest news headlines, or stream music and videos. To have to rely on cookbooks for recipes, an outdated encyclopedia for facts, and memory for general knowledge. (Yes, it all seems very quaint, until you're trying to contact emergency services in an area without signal, Marie Nield points out.)

"I'd love to live like this," guests would say.

But that's not a reason to leave swathes of the country without internet access, Stanley Nield says.

He'd tell them: "Just turn your phone off. You could do that anyway, anywhere."

Given he's able to leverage 3G signal for his connection – "clearly there's a signal path" – he doesn't understand why it hasn't been updated for more bandwidth.

"Does the rest of New Zealand care what's going on? That we're left out of the loop?"