Chorus has 15% of New Zealand fibre connections on 1Gbps plans

New Zealand broadband wholesaler Chorus has said it now has 105,000 users on 1Gbps connections, which it will wholesale for NZ$60 per month.

During its third quarter, the company added 18,000 extra 1Gbps plans, and said the new total represents 15% of its fibre connections. Across all fibre connections, it added 32,000 customers even though it had reduced installations in response to the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the planet.

For the three months to the end of March, Chorus passed an extra 13,000 premises with fibre.

Overall, Chorus saw all broadband connection reduce by 4,000 to 1.202 million, with 4,000 added in Chorus' UFB and rural areas, while the total number fixed-line connections dropped by 13,000, including 8,000 fewer copper voice lines in use.

In terms of data usage, monthly data use increased by 18% to 346GB, compared to the end of the second quarter. Broken down, it was 225GB for copper-based connections and 429GB for those on fibre.

Chorus also reported seeing an 85% increase in traffic in daytime hours.

Last week, NZ telco Spark said its network was seeing what it called a 7-day weekend, with increasing numbers of people working from home. The telco said its daytime broadband load had almost doubled, with peak broadband demand hitting 27% above normal levels, while mobile peak traffic was 22% higher. Spark added, however, that it had the capacity to handle the load.

In Australia, the National Broadband Network said last week it had seen traffic increase by 70% during the day. However, data throughput has died down this week.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, meanwhile, said it was seeing speeds on the Australian remain roughly where they were before the pandemic took hold.

At the end of December, NBN had just over 1 million fibre-to-the-premises and HFC connections on each technology, almost 2.2 million fibre-to-the-node users, 108,00 fibre-to-the-basement connections, 317,000 fibre-to-the-curb connections, 264,000 fixed wireless customers, and 46,000 on satellite connections, according to a recent Australian Communications and Media Authority report

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