Telecom New Zealand and Vodafone have reached an agreement with the government to jointly roll-out high-speed broadband services in the rural areas of the country.
The infrastructure to be built as part of the Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) will be…
Telecom New Zealand and Vodafone have reached an agreement with the government to jointly roll-out high-speed broadband services in the rural areas of the country.
The infrastructure to be built as part of the Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) will be built on an open access basis.
Mark Ratcliffe, CEO of Telecom New Zealand’s network business Chorus, said: “Because we’re able to build on significant existing infrastructure, capability and experience we can achieve a whole lot in a very short period of time. Within the first year we will have connected around 500 rural schools to fibre.”
Last November, the Telecom New Zealand/Vodafone group was one of the five bidders for the government’s NZ$285m tender to develop broadband services in rural areas. It was shortlisted along with Torotoro Waea and FX Networks/OpenGate in December, to be finally chosen in February.
The Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Steven Joyce, said that 252,000 customers in rural New Zealand would get access to high speed broadband that compares to urban levels of service and prices.
Under the final contracts, Telecom and Vodafone have committed to:
-giving access to broadband peak speeds of at least 5Mbps to 86% of rural houses and businesses;
-building 154 new mobile phone towers and upgrading 380 existing towers to enable fixed wireless broadband services;
-extending Telecom New Zealand’s fibre network by about 3,100 kilometres;
-adding 6,200 square kilometres of mobile coverage across the country;
-connecting 700 rural schools directly to fibre networks and 48 schools through digital microwave radio technology
-having wholesale prices comparable to urban pricing
-allowing competitors to access rural broadband infrastructure on a non-discriminatory basis;
-extending Telecom New Zealand’s urban-like fixed-line broadband speeds to 57% of the rural customers;
-and upgrading the network to provide 4G technology.
The RBI infrastructure roll-out is expected to start in July to be completed over the next six years.
