Chorus, the wholesale operation that was spun out of Telecom New Zealand in 2011, has laid out its next two-year buildout phase of its portion of the government's Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) initiative.
Beginning next year, Chorus will begin work on the final 24 "candidate areas" including Waiheke Island in Auckland, and finish work in nine other provincial towns and cities. The service provider will build network facilities in Blenheim, Ashburton, Timaru and Oamaru and Waiuku, Rotorua, Taupo, and Greymouth followed by Queenstown by the end of June 2016.
Ed Beattie, general manager of Chorus' Infrastructure Build department, said it will deploy fiber to "over 250,000 New Zealand homes, schools, medical centres and businesses," enabling over half a million customers in Chorus areas to connect to the UFB.
Beattie added that they plan "to have completed around 57 percent of our UFB coverage target by June 2016."
By the end of 2019, Chorus said that it will have expanded the reach of its existing 29,000 km fiber network to provide UFB-based connectivity to over 830,000 urban homes, businesses, schools, hospitals and medical facilities throughout New Zealand.
For more:
- see the release
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