Call for govt action to prevent repeat of warship internet outages

Internet experts say the government must do more to avoid internet outages, after a warship knocked out services to Taranaki and Marlborough.

Interference from an Australian warship's navigation radar caused internet and radio services to fail in those regions on Wednesday.

The 230-metre HMAS Canberra was sailing through Cook Strait when its systems disrupted 5 GHz wireless access points.

The chief executive of the Telecommunications Users Association, Craig Young, said it showed the vulnerability in the country's network.

"It was fixed quite quickly once they figured out what was going on," he said.

"But it does show that we do have a weakness in the current way that radio spectrum, this is what's used for broadband and regional New Zealand, can be overridden by a stronger signal in an area where this frequency can be used by other users."

Young said that in New Zealand, like anywhere in the world, radio frequencies were used for delivering all sorts of services, including mobile and broadband.

"And what happened was, in this case, a radio signal that was stronger than the one that was being used to provide broadband was interrupting the broadband," Young said.

"It was the ship with the radar and they were using the same frequency, unaware that in New Zealand that frequency was used for delivering broadband to users."

He said rural and regional areas were particularly vulnerable and actions from the government were needed to avoid disruptions from happening in future.

"We need a better way to allocate certain parts of the spectrum to people like these broadband providers so they don't get interrupted."

Sam James, a technical manager at TPNET, which provides broadband services across the Tasman and Marlborough areas, said his services were affected on Wednesday.

"This kind of event is rare, and to be fair, no one really did anything wrong. The equipment behaved exactly as it's designed to — it's just that a visiting warship doesn't normally show up in the spectrum plan," he said.

"Once the source was identified, we understand the ship adjusted frequencies to reduce disruption, and things settled down pretty quickly.

"That said, the incident does highlight how fragile rural networks can be when built entirely on a shared or congested spectrum."

James said Australia and the US were opening up new spectrum bands like 3 GHz and 6 GHz to give regional providers more room to build high-capacity, resilient links.

"But here in New Zealand, those same bands remain mostly off-limits or underutilised — even though the gear is available and the need is growing."

A serious conversation was needed about "spectrum access, infrastructure resilience, and making sure critical services aren't just one radar sweep away from a dropout", James said.

Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith told RNZ he would be "discussing the matter with officials".

rnz.co.nz