Chorus doubles broadband speed
At 8 gigabits a second, Chorus Hyperfibre plan is twice as fast as current maximum
New Zealand already had some of the fastest residential broadband in the world with Chorus’ 4 gigabit per second ( Gbps) Hyperfibre plan. Now Chorus has doubled that with its new 8Gbps Hyperfibre service — with Orcon the first retail internet service provider to offer it.
It’s partly about raw speed thrills for power geeks, but there’s also some intriguing industry politics at play.
To give a feel for the bandwidth, imagine this: you’re in a hurry leaving for a flight and you want to download a high-resolution movie to your tablet using Netflix’s new download-and-go option.
With a copper line it would take around half an hour — if you were lucky.
And on a 100 megabit per second (Mbps) connection (the most popular type of UFB fibre plan), it would take six minutes. Not bad, but still a bit of a toe-tapper.
With an 8Gbps Hyperfibre plan, it would take five seconds.
That 8Gbps equals 8000Mbps, meaning the new “Hyperfibre 8” service is 80 times faster than the cheapest form of UFB connection, a 100Mbps plan). Chorus says the blisteringly fast service is now accessible to about 150,000 residential and business customers in some parts of Auckland and Wellington.
Chorus launched Hyperfibre — a turbocharged version of UFB fibre — nationwide in October last year with 2Gbps and 4Gbps plans.
“Several hundred” high-speed thrillseekers have signed on since then, says Chorus chief customer officer Ed Hyde.
While Orcon has the 8Gbps field to itself, some 20 retail ISPs now offer 2 or 4Gbps Hyperfibre, with Orcon and MyRepublic pushing it the hardest.
The new superfast services do come at a price: a 2Gbps Hyperfibre plan costs about $150 a month, a 4Gbps plan $185 and 8Gbps is $275. And as any exchange of data over the internet is only as strong as its weakest link, you’ll more often than not be dealing with a link that will be slower than 2Gbps.
And we have to keep in perspective just how much our bandwidth options have exploded. A recent Commerce Commission benchmarking report found a UFB connection of “only” 100Mbps is still enough for a household to stream four ultra-high-definition (4K) streams of Netflix at once. (I put “only” in inverted commas because the Australian regulator’s benchmarking tops out at 100Mbps — a mark of how far
ahead NZ is in transtasman terms).
So who’s buying?
“Currently Hyperfibre is appealing mainly to small and medium enterprises, in a variety of sectors, from what you’d expect — design studios, gaming companies — through to more traditional businesses like accounting firms,” says Taryn Hamilton, chief executive consumer and business for Vocus NZ (the parent company of Orcon, Slingshot and Flip, which is also pulling the levers behind the scenes for Sky’s new broadband service).
“There is some interest from residential customers as well.”
Beyond the ComCom’s clutches
For Chorus, it’s also important to keep ahead in the bandwidth arms race against the fixed-wireless services that have grown so quickly for Spark and Vodafone (and will be pushed hard by 2degrees, too, after it starts its 5G upgrade this year).
There’s another reason for Chorus’ enthusiasm for 1Gbps plans — and now Hyperfibre: a new telecommunications regime, to be phased in from January next year, will see the Commerce Commission regulate the price of an “anchor” UFB plan, which it has judged to be a 100Mbps service. InternetNZ argued that was too low down the food chain, given so many people setting up a new connection, or switching ISPs, now go with a 1Gbps — in other words, 1000Mbps — plan, but to no avail.
But beyond the 100Mbps “anchor plans”, Chorus will have a degree of wholesale price freedom.
A “degree of”, because the commission will also cap the maximum amount the UFB network operator can earn from fibre each year overall. The amount is yet to be finalised.
So there’s been an incentive for Chorus to offer retail ISPs keen pricing for its 1Gbps and faster plans.
So far — whether as an intended consequence or not — it’s meant that Kiwi households and small businesses can now tap into the sort of bandwidth that a few years ago was available only to the largest firms.