Dairy manufacturing co-operative, Dairy Farmers, has opted to use collective bargaining power to secure low-cost broadband access for its members, after commissioning research on rural Internet service.

The company is currently negotiating with Telstra to give 2700 farmers, located in a farming belt that stretches from far-north Queensland to South Australia, access to broadband.

According to Dairy Farmers, the broadband deal is not a reflection on rural telecommunications levels. The industry body wants to promote Internet use among farmers in tandem with the launch of a new online service for its members, Milkline.

"The reason why we are negotiating with Telstra at the moment is purely to provide our farmers with a better service offering," said Andreas Luiskandl, Dairy Farmers e-commerce manager. "It's not a reflection of the quality of the service at the moment".

In April Dairy Farmers commissioned its partner in the Milkline project, Deloitte Touche-Tomhatsu, to conduct a report on Internet availability and usage among its members.

The dairy co-operative is cautious about releasing all the details contained in the report, but it claims it reflects positively on efforts by Government and Telstra to improve telecommunications levels in rural and remote regions over the last two years.

"The major problem that our farmers had generally -- before our Milkline service came along -- was preserving a site once they had established a link and not having it crash on them," said Dairy Farmers external affairs manager, Stuart Silver.

According to Dairy Farmers' most recent survey, 85 percent of its members have a computer and Internet access. Of that group, it said 70 percent access e-mail every day.

The statistic is in stark contrast to findings of similar surveys conducted by Dairy Farmers two years ago. Then, only 30 to 40 percent of the co-op's members had Internet access, according to Silver.

Dairy Farmers said it won't know if its members are having difficulty accessing the Milkline service until it receives feedback from farmers over the coming month. The co-operative sent all its members security tokens to access the service two days ago.

Luiskandl expects that broadband access delivered to farms will be either Satellite or ADSL.

"We're trying to do deals which involve greater numbers so we can bring the unit price down," said Silver.

However, Silver said that Telstra wants to bundle other services into the broadband package before it will agree to provide the discount service.

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