Published on the 26/01/2017 | Written by Newsdesk

Phase 2 rollout to put fibre within reach of most New Zealanders…

Thanks to an enviable broadband network rollout, New Zealand’s reputation for enduring the tyranny of isolation is steadily being eliminated. With the government’s announcement that UFB is to be made available in an additional 151 towns around the country, high speed fibre to the home connections are soon to be within reach of up to 85 percent of the population by the end of 2024. Furthermore, Chorus has said it will be extending fibre to an additional 169 areas and 200,000 homes.

It’s one of those unfortunate facts of life that the more isolated a community, the lower its levels of development. This is made clear in at least two memorable publications: Thomas Sowell’s excellent Wealth, Poverty and Politics, in which the celebrated economist notes that civilizations that shut themselves off from the rest of the world are those that lag behind, and the 1972 film ‘Deliverance’.

Sowell wrote that isolation inhibits the development of the “knowledge, skills, experiences and habits” that lead to economic growth. Deliverance perhaps made the point more bluntly, where mountain dwellers are portrayed as socially inept and backward (but pretty good with a banjo, in at least one case).

In any event, Northpower, Ultrafast Fibre, Chorus and Enable have landed contracts worth a collective $300-million to extend the network to these towns. Communications minister Simon Bridges, in a statement, said “Phase two of the UFB build will see fibre rolled out across all mainland regions, to 151 more towns plus 43 suburban fringe areas around the larger centres which were covered by the first phase of the programme.

“This will provide around 423,000 additional New Zealanders in both rural and urban areas, from Ruatoria to Reefton, with access to world-class broadband.”

For its part, Chorus said it has reached an agreement with Crown Fibre Holdings to extend UFB to 200,000-plus homes and businesses beyond the 1.1 million customers in its existing UFB rollout areas. In a statement, Chorus CEO Mark Ratcliffe said fibre is undoubtedly the future of broadband. “In the five and a half years that we’ve been building the UFB network and connecting homes and businesses to fibre we’ve seen a huge upsurge in demand. We’re particularly pleased to see many of the towns and areas soon to benefit from fibre are within the Government’s Regional Growth Programme, helping to increase jobs, income and investment in regional New Zealand.”

Telecoms user group TUANZ welcomed the developments. “We have long advocated for fibre based services to be available to as many New Zealanders as possible,” said CEO Craig Young in a statement. “We welcomed the initial announcement of a proposed extension during the 2014 election campaign [to extend to 75 percent of the population] and while the fulfilment of that promise has taken some time, are happy to see that the target has been surpassed.”

TUANZ said the announcement ‘continues to reduce the copper gap that exists for the people who were originally left out of the UFB project’ and as such, “We are also pleased to see the inclusion of several areas on the fringe of the current cities that were also left out of the original plans,” Young said.

However, rural access remains a challenge, owing to the realities of cost-effectively putting an optical cable into sparsely populated areas. “Rural New Zealand deserves the same quality services as their urban cousins not only for lifestyle reasons, but because a vast amount of New Zealand’s economic innovation and prosperity comes from farms and businesses located within that last 15 percent” said Young.