With more than 1 million homes ready for connectivity with the high-speed fiber-optic broadband network, New Zealand’s telecom operator, Chorus has announced the number of Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) connections on its network has reached 500,000 numbers. Chorus also signaled its plans to reduce the wholesale price of its premium fiber broadband offering.
Chorus in a media release said that the demand for fiber connectivity has been strong for some time, but it has noticed a surge in demand in recent months. It was in April 2018, that the operator revealed the status of fiber connectivity, where the number of fiber customers was 400,000. Fiber deployments were rapidly progressing, but it has surprisingly surged and the provider has been able to meet the pressure from the market. Within approximately six months, around 100,000 numbers of fiber connections were done by its installation crew! This number corresponds to more than 5,500 fiber connections a day!
The fact that the operator could connect around 100,000 subscribers in six months is encouraging news to service providers who aim to deploy fiber optic broadband networks in shorter time schedules. Faster deployments lead to effective utilization of resources, which is key to cost optimization.
As more New Zealanders connect to fiber broadband, existing consumers are also moving away from entry-level plans towards higher speed plans to ensure they get the very best experience. High-speed broadband is necessary to enjoy the services offered by content generators worldwide. As nation’s leading service provider, Chorus wants to ensure New Zealanders are getting the very best out of the network. In order to facilitate the faster take-up, Chorus intends to reduce the wholesale price of its gigabit broadband services for residential customers.
Chorus will drop the fiber service prices from mid-2019. The wholesale price for the residential gigabit service will drop from $65 a month to $60, with a further reduction to $56 in mid-2020. Retailer service providers add their own margin to the wholesale price, independent of Chorus.
The demand for fiber broadband has been rapidly increasing and even more so now as more content moves online and New Zealanders prepare to live stream the Rugby World Cup and other sporting events in 2019. And there’s no sign of demand for fiber slowing down. As Chorus crosses the country laying fiber, more Kiwis can, and are, taking advantage of faster, more reliable broadband connections.
New Zealanders are downloading, streaming high-definition TV and gaming at a huge rate and the likely impact of online TV will continue to be felt in peak network traffic growth. As more content becomes available online, new devices are released to watch it on with higher video resolutions such as 4K (and soon 8K). What these numbers are overwhelmingly telling us is that as a nation our average data use is growing fast, and it will continue to grow faster in the coming years so being on the best available fiber connection is vital.
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