New Zealanders are Thirsty for Fast Internet
New Zealanders love the internet as much as the next guy, as revealed in a recent survey. According to Statistics NZ’s annual Internet Service Provider survey, the number of active fibre-optic connections in New Zealand reached 397,000 in the year ending June 2017. Last year,
12% of broadband connections in the country were fibre-optic. Now, the number has risen to 21%, showing a staggering 67%
increase.
Business performance senior manager Daria Kwon said, “We’re seeing lots of households moving to fibre, as it allows them
to have several people watching movies and playing video games at the same time, without slowing each other down.” Most
people, regardless of age, are all using the internet on a daily basis, so it is not surprising to see the growing
preference for fibre-optic connections.
The demand for ultra-fast broadband is growing rapidly. In the year ending June 2017, there were 159,000 new
connections, compared to 133,000 in the previous year. “The Ultra-Fast Broadband programme aims to have 87% of New
Zealanders able to access fibre by the end of 2022”, said Kwon. “Nearly 1.2 million households and businesses are
already able to connect to the fibre network, and around one-third of them are using it so far.”
However, New Zealand also had 3.8 million mobile phones with active internet connections at 30 June 2017, which showed
an 11% increase from the previous year. Mobile phone internet usage in the year ending June 2017 increased 104% from the
previous year, showing a figure of 6,453,000 gigabytes used. This equates to approximately 1,700 megabytes for each
mobile phone connection, compared to the 900 megabytes from the previous year.
Broadband connections consumed 276 million gigabytes of data in the year ending June 2017, which showed a 93% increase
from the previous year. “Residential broadband connections in New Zealand used around 170 gigabytes each, on average,
during the month of June 2017, compared with 88 gigabytes in June 2016,” Kwon said. According to the Annual Service
Provider Survey, the total number of home broadband connections actually decreased by 3%.
The number of broadband connections with no data cap increased to 62% by 30 June 2017, and 12% had a cap of 100
gigabytes or more a month. Residential connections with a data cap of 100 gigabytes or more have increased by 171%. The
survey revealed that New Zealanders want fast, convenient internet use.
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