Ultra-Fast Broadband

Lately, you may have heard a lot of talk about fibre. That’s because fibre optic cables are key to building New Zealand’s world-class telecommunications network now and in the future. Fibre can deliver large amounts of data further and faster than the copper cables that traditionally deliver telecommunications services.

Right now, we’re rolling out the government’s ultra-fast broadband (UFB) plan to bring fibre even closer to homes and businesses. This fibre to the premises (FTTP) network means it will be possible to deliver the highest data speeds that can support services like internet television and high definition video conferencing. The programme involves laying thousands of kilometres of fibre optic cable and ducting to bring ultra-fast broadband to more than 830,000 homes and businesses across New Zealand.

It’s a massive project that will keep us busy until the end of 2019. The good news is we have a head start because we’ve laying fibre since the early 1980’s.

We already have 30,000km of fibre connecting our telephone exchanges and suburban broadband cabinets. This means that today, around 80% of New Zealanders are connected to a network with a fibre backbone so they can access higher speed broadband services or take advantage of new DSL technologies like VDSL2.

Now, we’re working with the Crown on the ultra-fast broadband initiative which takes fibre one step further – all the way to the gate or doorstep of homes and businesses.

View our video of the fibre rollout.

We’re taking the fibre from the local exchange to new fibre cabinets in throughout the neighbourhood. From there we’ll lay microduct down each street in our UFB area, and blow the fibre through the microduct to the premises when a customer is ready to connect to fibre. You can register that you are ready to connect to fibre here [link to registration form].

We’ll install the fibre cables along the street using existing ducts, dig or drill to install new ducts and microduct, or in some cases we may use existing street poles; although we prefer to put the network underground wherever possible.

Once we’ve completed the work in each area, business and residential customers will be able to arrange a fibre connection with their telecommunications service provider. They will then contact us to make the last connection which can be made by stringing the fibre optic cable from an existing street pole, through an existing underground duct, or through a new underground duct we install to the property.

The fibre is finally connected to the External Termination Point (ETP) which is a box on the outside of a house or building where the fibre network is joined to the internal wiring.  Buildings such as apartment blocks will need fibre cabling run up to each individual apartment.

Schools and hospitals get priority. Our fibre-to-the-school deployment starts with the schools in the list below getting fibre during this first year which runs to the end of June 2012. Chorus is still in the middle of plans for delivering fibre to the rest of the schools in the Chorus UFB areas, and will announce these separately.

All questions from schools should be directed to the Ministry of Education.

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