We are delighted to announce that our Chorus ONT RGW service will be released on 27 October 2020*.

This new service has been in trial and co-development for over the last six months. The feedback and engagement we have had from you has been very positive and we would like to thank you for this.

Today, we are pleased to confirm an early release date for this service along with our pricing and promotion details.

Chorus ONT RGW Service

Chorus ONT RGW turns our Chorus 3rd Generation ONT into a residential gateway with Wi-Fi capabilities. This removes the need for you to provide a physical modem, enabling faster service activation and a simplified customer experience for your customers.  This is game-changing in the intact space, where a 3rd generation ONT, configured in RGW mode will allow you to connect to fibre in hours. We have over 150,000 3rd Generation ONTs installed in kiwi homes right now and more being installed every day with every new fibre order we receive from you.

Availability

We will be launching this new service in two releases:

• Early release – on 27 October 2020*, the service will be made available to you.  You’ll find more details in the table below.
• Full Release – we would like to release full functionality for the service in December 2020*.  However, we appreciate that this may be challenging given the time of year and the ongoing impacts of Covid-19 on all businesses. We are keen to understand what impact this may have on your business before confirming the full release date.

Our understanding is that full release should not have a major impact on your provisioning systems. However, we do not want to underestimate the effort required from your business to make these changes. 

To allow you to effectively assess the impact of a December launch, we will share parameter information with you by 13 August via a separate update and seek feedback on whether our full release launch date should be moved out to February 2021.

Difference between early vs full release

Pricing

Based on feedback we received from you in the recent pricing survey, the most popular option selected was a lower monthly fee + an option to upgrade to 3rd Generation ONT for a reduced one-off fee. 

We have listened to your feedback and are pleased to confirm our pricing as below:

• A monthly fee of $1.30 per ONT
• A one-off fee of $50 to swap a 1st & 2nd Generation ONT for a 3rd Generation ONT to enable the RGW Wi-Fi feature

Promotional offer

To support early adopters consuming this service, we are releasing a promotional offer for 6 months by giving a $50 upgrade credit for each connection to which the RGW Wi-Fi service is enabled. The promotion is valid from 27 October 2020 to 26 April 2021. 

Next steps & contact

If you are interested to find out how to onboard for this service in preparation for the early release, please get in touch with your Account Manager. Our onboarding team will handhold you through the onboarding process to ensure you are ready to consume the service on day one.

We are also thinking about the future of the in-home experience, and how this service might evolve as customer demands shift over time. We are working with Nokia on enabling EasyMesh capability in the 3rd Generation ONT and hope to have it available late Q1 or early Q2 2021; we will confirm this as the development timing becomes clear.

In Q4 of this calendar year, we will look to share our thinking and consult with you on our future ONT Wi-Fi Roadmap and required features (e.g. WiFi 6, mesh, Hyperfibre support). You will hear more about this closer to the time.

*Note - timing of launch is subject to Crown Infrastructure Partners (CIP) approval.