Overview 

With continued growth in the average household data usage over fibre in New Zealand, it’s vital that we continue to enhance the performance of our fibre services to ensure we meet growing demand. In July and August, we consulted with you on how our Future Fibre Portfolio might look to gather your views. 

We have reviewed and considered the feedback received and are now ready to confirm the outcome for our residential  and SME plans.

You can find more details about the feedback we received here.

 

What’s happening 

We are pleased to announce that between mid-November and early December 2021 we will boost/upgrade the speeds of the following offers:

1. Consumer 100/20 will be boosted to 300/100.
2. Business Evolve 100/100 will be boosted to 300/300. 
3. Small Business Fibre 100/100 will be boosted to 500/500. 

The 100/20 anchor service will be available from 1 January 2022.  

We will continue to monitor the current COVID-19 response situation and any potential implications for these upgrades. 

 

The detail

We will implement these speed upgrades through synchronised network and system scripts. This approach allows us to implement the changes in a more efficient and scalable manner than could be achieved via bulk service requests. 

For clarity, these changes will be upgrades to the existing plans; you will not need to build new plans or withdraw any of your  existing offers to benefit from these upgrades. These speed increases only apply to Low Traffic Class Bandwidth. High Traffic Class will remain at 2.5/2.5 Mbps.

We will provide more detail on this approach, including implementation dates within the above window, by the end of October.

Chorus is not proposing any price increases as part of the upgrade proposals. With the Consumer 300/100 upgrade, we are committing to mirror the pricing of the regulated anchor service (100/20) during PQP1 which includes annual CPI price adjustments. We also reaffirm our commitment to not increase pricing of our Small Business Fibre plans for a 2-year period from July 2020.  

The technical specifications of the new speeds are as follows: 

 

These are available for testing in Chorus Co-Innovation Laboratory (CCIL) on request and will be available for production testing in October. 

You will need to adjust your BNG settings before your customers will be able to utilise the new speeds. Our laboratory testing has shown that:

• If you do not update your BNG configuration then your customers will continue to get a similar performance to what they get today.
• Customers on 100Base-T CPE will also continue to get a similar performance before and after.

This should not be considered definitive as it may depend on your specific network configuration or customer CPE and we recommend you test this scenario beforehand, if it applies to you.

We have also updated the FAQ section on the dedicated webpage and will continue to keep this page up to date as we progress.

 

Next steps

This is notice of the mass market residential and SME speed boosts, which will be implemented between mid-November and early December 2021. 

We may revisit in the event of prolonged COVID-19 response restrictions

We will provide more detail around these changes, including dates, by the end of October.

 

Contact

If you have any queries, please contact Roxinne McCord.