Fibre installation delays as demand surges

The roll-out of ultrafast broadband has passed another milestone with threequarters of the first stage of the network completed, ahead of schedule.

But the wait to get connected has increased with a surge of fresh orders.

About 75 per cent of homes and businesses were originally due to get access to UFB by the end of 2019.

Communications Minister Simon Bridges said threequarters of that build had now been completed, meaning that more than 1,132,000 households and businesses had access to fibre.

United States researcher Akamai said average broadband speeds in New Zealand had increased 40 per cent to nearly 15 megabits-per-second over the past year. Mobile broadband users were seeing average speeds of 13Mbps, Akamai said.

Bridges said that meant New Zealand was ‘‘tied for third-fastest in the Asia Pacific region’’ and put New Zealand alongside other ‘‘global connectivity leaders’’ such as Japan and South Korea.

An additional 10 per cent of homes and business are due to get UFB by the end of 2024 under an extension of the UFB scheme that was announced in January.

Chorus, which is building about 80 per cent of the overall network, said it had completed 63 per cent of ‘‘UFB1’’ as of the end of March.

In areas where it has laid UFB, 35 per cent of customers had now connected to the network, it said.

Customer services manager Nick Woodward said customers were giving Chorus an average rating of ‘‘7.3 out of 10’’ for UFB installs, up from ‘‘6.5 of out 10’’ in December 2015.

The number of installs that had to be rescheduled on the day had dropped from 14 per cent to 4 per cent over the period, he said.

Chorus spokesman Nathan Beaumont said that represented a ‘‘massive improvement’’ on where the company was 12 to 18 months ago.

But there are some signs the company may be struggling to keep up with the demand for connections after giving it a push along.

The average waiting time for UFB installs jumped to 18 working days in May following a 42 per cent surge in orders to nearly 25,000 in March, and a drop in available fibre crews.

That was up from a waiting time of between eight to 10 working days between January and April.

In areas where the communal network has just been installed, it is not uncommon for customers to have to wait five weeks to get connected.

Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Craig Young said a promotional campaign Chorus was running to encourage people to get on the fastest broadband available was causing an increase in orders.

‘‘We hope that they have planned for that and worked out what they needed to do to manage that.’’

But people seemed to be reasonably comfortable with how the rollout was progressing, he said.

Beaumont agreed the increase in UFB orders in May was because of Chorus’ ‘‘better broadband’’ campaign.

‘‘We’re recruiting more people to add to our fibre crews and we expect lead times to come back down to normal levels reasonably quickly,’’ he said.