NZ broadband zooming past Australia

Australia may be a bigger, better-paid and more powerful nation than New Zealand. Yet there are areas where we are way out in front.

Recently I’ve worked on a project reporting on the state of broadband networks around the world. Without giving my client’s story away — I’ll share it when the feature is published — I discovered New Zealand average download speeds are already significantly higher than those found in Australia.

We are three years into a ten year building the Ultrafast Broadband or UFB network, which will connect fibre to home in towns and cities nationwide. Which means the speed gap is only going to widen as more New Zealanders can connect to fibre and switch away from copper broadband.

Fibre broadband sign-ups in line with international experience

Yesterday Communications Minister Amy Adams reported New Zealand’s Ultrafast Broadband network now passes 517,000 premises.

More importantly 39,510 people have signed to buy fibre services. In round numbers that’s eight percent of the possible market. The number is roughly in-line with rates seen in similar fibre projects elsewhere in the world.

Sure there have been niggles about aspects of the UFB roll out, but, on the whole, Chorus, Enable Networks, Ultrafast Fibre and NorthPower have done an excellent job laying fibre. And now the ISPs are starting to sell fibre services in earnest. As they ramp up their sales efforts we can expect customer numbers to go much higher.

While it hasn’t all been smooth sailing and no doubt there will be shoals ahead to navigate, the project is tracking well. This is something New Zealand does very well.