High Speed Broadband Over Fibre

25 August 2006

Telecom Ready To Provide Residential Customers High Speed Broadband Over Fibre

Telecom’s Fibre to the Premise (FTTP) technology pilot at Mission Heights in Manukau City enters a new phase this week.

The new subdivision’s first homes are now built and Telecom is ready to offer residents the first New Zealand consumer trial of a Next Generation Broadband (NGB) service over fibre as soon as they move in.

“This is a really exciting time for us,” says Kevin Kenrick, Telecom Chief Operating Officer Consumer. “We’ve been developing our FTTP technology pilot for over a year and the focus so far has been on learning what’s involved with deploying fibre.”

“We’re now set up to offer broadband over fibre to customers and start developing our understanding of what’s involved in servicing and maintaining it.”

Telecom is hoping to have three or four households using the trial service in the next few weeks – the exact dates and the number of trial participants is dependent on when they move in to their new homes. It’s believed that households using the service will increase to about 30 by Christmas and exponentially from there. Fibre has been laid to approximately 450 sites in Mission Heights.

Participants will get to trial a high speed Next Generation Broadband (NGB) service with expected peak downstream speeds of up to 30 Megabits per second (dependant on some external factors). There will be no monthly fees for this NGB service for the duration of the trial - with the only cost to the customer being a $49.95 activation fee. The trial will run until 31 July 2007.

This phase of the trial will also look at what services can be run over it, and most importantly what the customer experience is from using it Mr Kenrick says.

“To test the NGB fibre service it’s important that customers experience a range of Broadband applications. This may include future NGB services such as a home video phone, Internet Protocol (IP) television and Next Generation Voice services,” Mr Kenrick says.

Telecom is working with two key partners on the FTTP technology pilot and the NGB fibre service.

Worldwide broadband leader Alcatel, Telecom's Next Generation Network transformation partner, is providing the FTTP equipment, network design and operations support for the trial.

Manukau City Council has provided the location. They were chosen partially because of their commitment to developing the city as a technology-savvy city through their SmartManukau programme.

It was also important to choose a new subdivision as this would result in less infrastructure disruption than would occur in an existing suburb - and the Mission Heights development timing fitted well with the pilot.

ENDS

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