An illustration showing a neighbourhood of brightly coloured houses connected from the street by the Chorus fibre network.

Our network

About Chorus

We are New Zealand’s open access internet infrastructure company, keeping Kiwis connected to each other and the rest of the world.

Our network provides New Zealand’s people, communities and businesses greater access to ever-expanding opportunities with world class broadband. We provide wholesale access to our network so that broadband providers can then sell their broadband plans and packages to you.

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An illustration of an urban street screen showing a local exchange and the copper and fibre connection it houses.

How we get the internet to you

Building the network

Right now, we’re building the network of the future, rolling out fibre to more than 1.3 million homes and businesses so that New Zealand can be one of the best connected countries in the world.

We connect a home or business to fibre broadband every minute of the working day.

How we get the internet to you

Fibre

Our fibre network uses fibre optic cable to transport huge amounts of data via pulses of light at ultra-fast speeds. Fibre performance doesn’t degrade over distance so your broadband speed is consistent.

Where possible, we’re taking fibre from the local exchange past your house so you can connect to the new network.

How we get the internet to you

Copper

Our copper network uses existing copper lines to provide phone and broadband services to your property. Each home is connected to a local roadside cabinet by a copper pair (two copper cables twisted together). With copper, the distance from your house to the roadside cabinet can affect your broadband speed and performance.

ADSL is our basic broadband service operating over copper. VDSL is part fibre, providing faster connections. VDSL is available to 80 per cent of the country right now.

An illustration of two residential houses.

How we get the internet to you

Local Exchange

All of our copper and fibre cables and connections end up at the local exchange. Chorus has 600 local exchanges around the country. Each local exchange connects anywhere from 500 – 50,000 homes.

The Chorus fibre and copper network is congestion free, meaning our network will always have more capacity for data than you need so that we can continue to deliver the same reliable connection at any time of the day.

BROADBAND PROVIDERS CHORUS POI

Connecting you to the internet

At the local exchange, the data from your broadband connection travels on to a point of interconnect (POI). There are 30 POI in major towns and cities around New Zealand. The POI is where our network ends and we hand over the data to your broadband provider’s network. Broadband providers are the companies that provide you with access to the internet.

An illustration of two residential houses.