Telcos measured coverage by headcount, which is why farms went dark

New Zealand switched off 3G in March on the strength of a statistic that was never about farms. The industry’s population-coverage figure says almost everyone is covered. The land the country actually earns its export income from tells a different story, and farmers are now paying the difference in equipment, workarounds and compliance risk.

The survey the telcos did not want

Federated Farmers’ latest Rural Connectivity survey of nearly 650 farmers, run in late August and early September, is the first comprehensive read since the shutdown. It is ugly. Half of farms now have mobile coverage on less than half of the property, a third have a spot that worked on 3G and now gets nothing, and nearly two in three cannot reliably reach 111 from most of their farm. Eight percent cannot reach emergency services anywhere on the property.

The response from providers has been worse than the coverage. Of 126 farms that reported a problem to their telco, only two had it resolved. Federated Farmers telecommunications spokesperson Mark Hooper called provider responsiveness “very frustrating”, which is restrained for a two-in-126 success rate. The same survey found two in three farmers now pay out of pocket for workarounds such as satellite broadband, while only 15% rate satellite-to-mobile as an adequate substitute for a tower. Many have also spent thousands replacing 3G-dependent irrigation controls, pivots and cow collars.

Population coverage was the wrong yardstick

The crux is a measurement choice. Spark, 2degrees and One NZ cite 4G coverage of 99% of the population, but the Commerce Commission’s land-mass figure was just 54.6%, up from 54.3% a year earlier. Farms are mostly land with few people on it. A metric weighted by headcount was always going to declare victory while paddocks went quiet.

Even the Commission’s own connectivity map uses a 50% land-parcel threshold, which can flatter large properties with uneven signal.

The NZ Telecommunications Forum argues that networks reach “between ~98.5-99% of where New Zealanders live and work” and that the footprint has grown over the past decade. It also concedes the population figure masks rural reality. Chief executive Paul Brislen says customers should find 4G wherever they used to find 3G and that investigations are needed before blaming the shutdown, while acknowledging that failing to reach 111 “shouldn’t be happening at all”.

The warning was on the record

None of this is a surprise. In December 2025, Precision Farming chief executive Chloe Walker said her concern was “whether telecommunications providers have had enough time to build adequate 4G/5G coverage before the 3G network is removed”. The industry’s message at the time was that farmers should upgrade their devices. Farmers did. The network did not keep pace.

The shutdown also landed on an already weak base. In 2025, Federated Farmers’ survey of 600 farmers found mobile coverage averaged just 57% of farmland, unchanged since 2022. Back in 2022, 32% of respondents reported declining mobile service and more than half called connectivity a frequent health and safety concern.

That is despite real public money. By September 2024, $2.2 billion had been invested in connectivity programmes and 518 mobile towers were live. The towers exist. They just do not reach where the work happens.

A productivity tax with a compliance edge

This is where it stops being a consumer gripe. One farmer in the latest survey failed a WorkSafe audit because patchy coverage made two-hourly checks on staff impossible. Geraldine dairy farmer Jimmy Emmett pointed to the “obvious risks” when people work alone. Regulators increasingly assume connectivity: lone-worker obligations, NAIT livestock recording, digital compliance systems. Hooper warned in July that unreliable connections jeopardise systems like NAIT, and that farmers are in “a sort of limbo period, or purgatory if you prefer”, with decent satellite voice and data still a year or two away.

For any agricultural employer, the arithmetic is simple. Replacement hardware, a satellite subscription that barely works, staff time lost walking to the one spot with signal, and a duty-of-care exposure if someone is hurt out of range. None of it shows up in a telco’s coverage chart. All of it shows up in a farm’s costs.

Measure the paddock next time

The Forum’s advice to contact your telco about satellite or Wi-Fi calling rings hollow when two complaints in 126 get fixed. The fix is not another subsidy round spread thinly. It is accountability: land-mass coverage as the headline metric, published fault-resolution data, and a hard rule that no legacy network is retired again, copper included, until replacement service is proven on the ground rather than per head of population.

Agriculture is the country’s biggest export earner. Treating its connectivity as a rounding error was a policy failure dressed up as a technology upgrade, and farmers should not be left to pay for the gap.

Sources

• 1News: ‘Frustrating’: 3G shutdown leaves farmers struggling for signal (2026-10-11)
• Farmers Weekly: Farmers stuck in connectivity limbo after 3G switch-off (2026-07-08)
• NZ Telecommunications Forum: Connectivity across Aotearoa – beyond the 3G shutdown (2026-06-23)
• Rural News Group: Farmers warned to upgrade as 3G shutdown looms (2025-12-02)
• RNZ: Call for urgent action over rural connectivity crisis (2025-09-26)
• Commerce Commission: Telecommunications connectivity map (2025)
• Federated Farmers: Rural Connectivity Survey 2022 (via Commerce Commission) (2022-06)
• National Infrastructure: Quarterly connectivity update to 30 September 2024 (2024-09)