Chorus has announced that a nine-year Phase I of ultra-fast broadband fiber in New Zealand has been completed – on time and on budget. It involved bringing world-class broadband to 28 towns and cities. In building the first phase of UFB, Chorus laid about 28,000kms of fiber cabling. 

With the first phase of the fiber connection now complete, Chorus continues to work on the second phase, UFB2, and UFB2+, taking fiber to a further 300 or so communities. When Chorus began the fibre rollout, the contractual target was to achieve 20 percent uptake by the end of 2019. Uptake is currently sitting at more than 55 percent.

The project was initiated in 2010 through a public-private partnership and Chorus began construction in 2011. AS part of the project Vodafone has been installing new towers and upgrading existing towers. Chorus provided a super-fast fibre broadband connection to Vodafone broadband towers. 

Here are some statistics about the first phase :

• Total length of fiber cable laid: 28,000kms
• Length of individual strands of fiber laid: 2.2 million km
• Target for the uptake of fiber was 20 percent by the end of 2019, uptake today is 55 percent
• When Chorus started the fiber build in 2011:
  • the average connection speed was 10Mbps – it’s now over 125Mbps
  • the average internet data usage was 12GBs, it’s now 297GBs
• Chorus residential and small business fiber users are now averaging 360GBs of internet data monthly
• Peak time network throughput now regularly above 2Tbps
• New peak time record of 2.60Tbps coincided with the quarter-finals of Rugby World Cup
• Gigabit connections growing rapidly, now nearly 70,000