Infrastructure builder and wholesaler Chorus speeds up copper network decommission; non-fibre areas have broadband options, but will Starlink remain one of them?

Chorus has posted a mixed bag of results for its financial 2025 half year.

While nothing like the dire numbers presented by Spark last week, Chorus nevertheless pointed to "the challenges of New Zealand's prolonged economic recession".

Chorus is the network infrastructure builder and wholesaler created in 2011 and split off from Telecom New Zealand as a condition of winning the bids for the majority of the contracts for the government's Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) fibre to the premises rollout.

The growth in fibre connections is shoring up Chorus' finances, but ironically enough, retiring ye olde copper network is putting the squeeze on revenue and profit. For the 2025 half year, Chorus saw revenue drop by $3 million to $500 million, and it made a net loss after tax of $5 million. That's a reversal of the same period in 2024, when Chorus made a $5 million net profit after tax.

What's going on here? Nathan Beaumont from Chorus provided some context.

"It comes down to the fact that we are planning on retiring the copper network by 2030," Beaumont said. Soon, the profit hit from copper will abate, the Chorus' management presentation predicts:

Chorus said NZ is at the forefront of putting the old copper network out to pasture, and has just 10% of connections on the old-fashioned lines. In areas where fibre-optic connections are available, that amounts to some 28,000 connections. 

Notices have been sent out to customers in fibre areas that Chorus intends to accelerate the retirement of the copper network. It is now set to be fully withdrawn in fibre areas by end of financial year 2026, which is six months sooner than originally planned.

Copper lines are fault-prone and the technology uses more electricity than fibre-optic connections, while providing substantially lower performance; Chorus expects to save money on not having to fix copper network faults, and expects to save on power bills as well. 

As for performance, the lowest fibre plan will now provide 100 Mbit/s, and the most popular one, 500 Mbps downloads. Copper broadband cannot match fibre, ditto current fixed-wireless service.

But wait, there are more copper connections left

So, the full decommissioning of the copper network is scheduled for 2030. There are still quite a number of copper connections, around 80,000, in non-fibre areas. What will happen to those?

In February last year, Chorus said it would bring fibre to around 10,000 more premises across 59 communities around the country. Outside that fibre extension area is where things get tricky. Using Chorus' figures, that leaves 70,000 connections that won't be serviced by fibre.

Self-funding a fibre network is most likely a non-starter even in better times than the current deep recession, although it would be interesting to see if some regulatory changes could be brought in to lower the cost for community efforts.

Chorus suggests wireless providers as well as alternatives. Many wireless internet service providers (WISPs) do remarkable work to provide coverage in rural and remote areas. There's also the Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) from the government; the Rural Connectivity Group (RCG) which is the Three Telcos' joint venture is also available in different regions.

In some areas like the Far North, RBI has received a very decent service upgrade. Using a newish Oppo Android phone that can do Wi-Fi 7 standard hotspotting/tethering, an indicated four bars saw downloads on One NZ's network of 150-160 Mbps, and importantly, uploads of over 20 Mbps.

That and the ping times of 35 ms may seem a bit "meh" compared fibre, but the connection improvements make a big difference.

Those numbers mean you can do most things required on the Internet. That includes working in a beautiful part of New Zealand, pay the bills online for life there, and contribute to rates and the local economy.

What about satellite (read: Starlink) service then?

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites as a connectivity option has really caught on in NZ. For now it means SpaceX Starlink, as run by Elon Musk. The latest count from the Commerce Commission suggests NZ has over 37,000 Starlink customers, which is quite a number.

Satellite broadband is one of the connectivity options Chorus suggests.

"The availability of new satellite services has been a game changer for rural internet, delivering improved levels of speed and reliability. The emergence of new satellite-to-mobile phone solutions is also great for those just wanting a voice (phone) service in remote rural areas," Chorus writes.

As Starlink technology has developed and more satellites been put into orbit, the offering has become better. In simple terms, you get decent speeds, and low-ish latency (packet delay, important for a connection's responsiveness) with LEO satellites, and the price is coming down.

Trees, hills and mountains get in the way of that, but if you can work around the obstacles, Starlink seems a good option.

Unfortunately, unpleasant current geopolitics being what they are, there are now reports that Starlink service could be conditional on doing what the United States wants, or that's it, no more fast broadband from low Earth orbit. 

That threat is said to have been made against Ukraine, for which it would be a disaster to lose the important Starlink communications link. For New Zealand a service cancellation wouldn't be as critical, unless perhaps if we were to use Starlink to guide our naval drone strike force towards live firing warships rudely interrupting commercial airline traffic.

It's a risk that was always there, and it's now been spelt out. You can appreciate why the Chinese and Europeans are rushing to build their own LEO satellite networks. Just something to think about as we do national resilience planning in what looks like an increasingly messy era.