While our copper network has high levels of performance, a small percentage of your customers aren’t getting the same reliability as the rest of the network. We’ve proactively identified 20,000 active copper lines that are most at risk. Normally, we'd replace these as part of our network lifecycle programme. However given fibre’s already available at these addresses, it doesn’t make sense to replace the copper with more copper.

Forty per cent of the people on these cables have already moved off the copper network. We believe the best solution, is to encourage remaining customers to also move to fibre. We’d like your help to encourage the move.

Note this number represents a small part of our overall network that is nearing end-of-life. We continue to maintain the remaining copper lines to a high standard.

What’s changing

From today, any of these customers using our broadband checker (www.chorus.co.nz) will be prompted to contact you as soon as possible. We’ll explain that fibre is available, and that upgrading minimises the possibility of a fault occurring. Fibre is already in their area, and is our planned replacement for copper.

Next steps

We’d appreciate your support to contact these at-risk customers proactively. For a list of your affected customers, please ask your service delivery manager. As uptake grows, we expect this to be the start of an ongoing conversation about migrating customers to fibre.