Chorus has launched a new network build programme to bring fibre broadband to a further 10,000 premises across New Zealand, together with its infrastructure partner Ventia.
The premises are located in 59 areas which Chorus said spans Kerikeri in Te Tai Tokerau, to Otatara in Invercargill, which are all near existing fibre.
Under the agreement with Ventia, Chorus will spend about $40 million on the extension programme.
News of fibre network comes after Chorus said in this February it would slash $200 million from its Regulatory Period 2 (RP2) Proposal to the Commerce Commission, covering 2025 to 2028, as the share market listed company felt the regulatory conditions were unclear.
Originally, the RP2 had Chorus saying it'd spend about $230 million on extending fibre, if the policy and regulatory conditions were right.
However, Chorus spokesperson Steve Pettigrew told interest.co.nz that "in the first round of submissions to our RP2 proposals, it became clear that RSPs [retail service providers], officials and some in the market were considering this investment 'locked in'."
"So, for clarity, on 5 February, we announced that we’d remove about $200 million from the RP2 main proposal and instead submit this as an individual capex request to the Commission as and when the conditions were right," Pettigrew said.
Chorus said the completed Ultra-Fast Fibre (UFB) programme between 2011 and 2022 covered 412 towns and cities.
Nearly 1.4 million homes and businesses are connected to the UFB, which is a service uptake of over 70%.
18 Comments
No sure fibre will be the best solution for NZ going forwards. 4G Wireless has come a long way and its a much cheaper option and plenty fast enough for most people. SpaceX satellite could significantly change things, looking forward to at least text coverage for the whole of NZ soon.
We're on 5G now with 6G around the corner, but wireless and fibre-optic are aimed at two different applications. Due to the laws of physics, wireless data speeds will never match those achievable with optical fibre. There are however cases when wireless and/or satellite are the best options from a price/performance point of view.
Chorus has done really well getting per-premise cost down to very affordable levels for fibre installations. Building cellular sites (with fibre-optic backhaul ideally) and firing rockets up into low earth orbit is not exactly cheap.
Yes I was surprised when I looked up 4G plans a few weeks back. $55 per month for unlimited 4G at home.
The speeds are nothing to write home about though as you'd expect with a cellular connection, but that's good value for money.
/ Posted on Gigabit Down / Half Gigabit Up
25% of residential fibre connections are on speeds of 1 Gbps or greater, and 16% of them are downloading more than 1 TB of data a month. How fast or available do you think the shared mobile network would be if all these customers switched to mobile?
Australia tried the whole "we dont need a fibre network" and look where that has got them - they are now amongst the worst in the world for internet services"
"New data from Speedtest shows that Australia’s fixed-line broadband speed is among the slowest in the world, dropping to 93rd place".
I think this is yet another example of service provision to 90+% of where Kiwis live, work and play. When compared with the geographical spread, there's a big area not serviced by fibre. And that area is where a hell of a lot of of export product/revenue is produced.
In my rural area, the options are severely limited when thinking wireless cellular. Copper wire is ADSL. I use Gecko and, credit where credit is due, they filled a gaping connectivity hole (as Taylor Broadband). But speeds are slowish - I tolerate buffering breaks when streaming TV programmes.
Starlink - service is pretty reliable and speeds good. Personally, I don't like the seeming "God complex" mentality of Mr Musk and won't support his companies. I will tolerate what I've got now. But if fibre came down my road, I'd sign up quick smart.
Switched to starlink a couple months ago. Basically $40 extra for unlimited data and 100 times the speed we got from spark. Free to Change my cellphone plan and I'll save $20 of that $40.
Don't like Elon but was totally sick of what we had.
Should mention we were given the hardware free from some who didn't need it.
One of the very few benefits of lifestyle blocks expanding into my rural area has been the developer who paid an eye-watering sum of money to get fibre mounted on the power poles along my road, including right past my gate. All I had to do was dig the trench up to the house and lay in the conduit.
hmm, Powerco have sent me a notice they are hanging fibre optic on the poles crossing my land. I wonder if I can hook into that ?
They have already dug 2 or 3 lines along the roadside, different companies , I geuss , and they don't like breaking into the main lines apparently.
Wouldn't hurt to ask them. If you have enough land to have poles crossing it then they'll no doubt say it's a "non-standard installation" so there'll be costs involved in running the cable to your house but the actual internal work should be free. From memory Unison allowed about 20m of cable and anything over that I had to cover myself.
Had fibre put into a residential property in Palmerston North - workman ship was very poor - cable stapled on to timber palings on boundary fence and where it crossed the the lawn was dug into the ground by little more than 50 to 100 mm .Chorus tells me this was an acceptable installation. . Being paid large sums of money for poor installations. Not a fan of chorus or it partners
Found the Fibre cable just under the grass when I dug up our lawn to fix a leak once. I imagine the dude just gouged the grass with a screw driver, pushed the cable in and then stamped over it a few times.
But I guess when you think about it, a huge roll out like this it would be time consuming and costly to do a proper job.
The contractors were paid peanuts. Chorus would contract the work out then that subcontractor would contract out to migrants where they were paid per install they needed to do around 10 installs a day to earn enough to live, which was the equivalent of around 20 hours of work so they took shortcuts. This exploitation was ignored until most of the Fibre roll out was completed
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/386902/chorus-failed-to-prevent-mig…
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