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THE ALPINE
BRIGHT - POREPUNKAH - MT BEAUTY - TAWONGA - TAWONGA SOUTH Wednesday, July 20, 2022
Phone: (03) 5752 1058
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www.alpineobserver.com.au
ALPINE CROSSING
Will gets top job
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BRITT COX RETIRES
$17m walk is all go
Page 7
Reflecting on career
The project that could ease Bright’s Wi-Fi woes BRIGHT has long been plagued with mobile internet troubles caused by the town’s fluctuating population - the local tower unable to manage a tourist influx and their mobile connections. At its worst, when the town’s resident population rises between five to 10 fold, businesses can’t do EFTPOS transactions or access access cloud based apps, and there are concerns about safety messages not reaching the public during busy periods. But walk along the river
BY BRODIE EVERIST beverist@ nemedia.com.au
and you’ll now find Bright’s free Wi-Fi - a project hoped to alleviate the pressure off Bright’s regularly overloaded towers. “We’ve deployed a proof of concept, and now the next phase is determining how we take that forward into a full blown implementation,” said Bruce Hore, local IT expert and secretary of the Bright
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Chamber of Commerce. “We want someone who’s actually going to monitor it and support it properly. “We don’t want this just to be a small town thing, we want it to be professional, supportive and reliable.” The idea was first raised when the Bright Chamber of Commerce was approached by Two Cities One Community, a regional development group based in Albury-Wodonga, to consider a program of regional data centres along with public Wi-Fi.
$1.50 (inc.GST)
SPORT
WIFI WIZARD: Bruce Hore, local IT expert and secretary of the Bright Chamber of Commerce, installed the equipment now supplying free Wi-Fi in Bright’s riverside area. The wifi network was first deployed in January during Bright’s Alpine Classic cycling event. According to Mr Hore, Telstra was doing local maintenance, leaving the town with even less coverage than usual, and risking a cancellation of the event. Mr Hore, with members of the Albury Wodonga group, contacted the Bright Brewery, who lent space, power and access to their backup internet connection, allowing them to use their equipment to provide Wi-Fi.
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PUBLICATION ENQUIRIES Jenny Zamperoni | P: 0427 495 309 E: jking@nemedia.com.au | www.nemedia.com.au
The equipment, now sitting on the brewery roof, provides service to the Bright riverside area, including the market and community events. But the project requires local and State Government support and a telecoms provider to grow the model, as NBN services can only be resold by registered service providers. Last week, Mr Hore was planning to speak with Bendigo Telco about having the wifi signal distributed around the CBD, with bases dotted across the town.
“By putting multiple base networks around the place, it’ll feel like a seamless network, but we’ll have multiple hundreds of megabytes of connectivity,” he said. But For Mr Hore, while the project is a piece of local innovation, it also demonstrates a failure of government infrastructure policy, as Bright’s current mobile coverage should be sufficient. “As a regional area, you’ve got to ask the question - why is it even a thing?” he said.