Broadband players speed to market

Gigabit broadband will be available to most homes with access to the ultrafast broadband network from Saturday. But not everyone believes it will be worth the extra $30 or $40 a month.

Consumers can expect a flurry of marketing activity from internet providers as they claim to have arrived in the market first, cheapest or best dressed.

Australian-owned internet brand Orcon is taking orders in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton and Tauranga from tomorrow and will charge $135 a month for gigabit broadband on a two-year contract, with an XBox One S gaming console included.

Consumer manager Taryn Hamilton said internet users who already had ultrafast broadband (UFB) would be able to get the service ‘‘within days’’ while those who needed a connection to the network could expect to wait between two and six weeks.

Gigabit broadband will be available from other providers at much the same time.

Spark’s ‘‘ no frills’’ internet brand Bigpipe will offer the service from October for $129. It released a statement earlier this month saying it had already started upgrading customers in Christchurch and the central North Island.

Vodafone plans to release details of its gigabit service today.

Junior internet provider MyRepublic will also be in the game from Saturday and will upgrade customers on its 200 megabit per second (Mbps) plan – which offers a fifth of the download speed of gigabit broadband – for free over the course of the month.

New entrant Stuff Fibre will provide it as an upgrade that customers can turn on and off, for an extra $25 a month over its standard UFB pricing.

Hamilton said gigabit broadband would make a difference to homes where four or five people might be simultaneously watching different Netflix channels and gaming.

But John Butt, chief executive of broadband testing company TrueNet, said the extra speed should be ‘‘of no interest to anyone at all’’.

‘‘If you are upgrading your PC with a very large file, instead of downloading in five minutes it might download in 30 seconds. Maybe you do that once a year.’’

But it offered no advantages over 100Mbps UFB when browsing the internet or watching video, he said, as 100Mbps is ‘‘more than enough for four HD or 4K TVs and how many households have got more than four people watching TV on different channels at once?’’

Buffering on existing higher-speed UFB connections would be caused by bottlenecks outside the home, he said.

MyRepublic marketing manager Nicholas Keegan said that when people clicked on a 4K video stream on a 100Mbps connection that might cause buffering for gamers and other power users in the home, as computers would need to grab a chunk of the video for ‘‘headroom’’ before it started playing.

Perception could also be important. Some people will just want the ‘‘best of the best’’, Hamilton said.

‘‘The performance you get is going to be limited by elsewhere on the internet, which is a pretty big milestone.’’