Recently we let you know about the results of our industry consultation on Chorus SME business fibre enhancements.  

After assessing the feedback, which was generally positive, we can now share the specific enhancements that have been approved, so that you can plan to align your offerings with those we provide, if you choose to.

Our most recent Business Research 2024 highlighted some areas that New Zealand businesses value. Following your feedback, here are the enhancements that we plan to deliver for selected SME business fibre plans:

• Launch Small Business Hyperfibre 1G – with a 1G symmetrical plan (1000Mbps download & upload), we hope to encourage customers into the XGSPON space, which offers greater performance and facilitates simpler upgrades to higher bandwidth plans as data needs for businesses inevitably grow.
• Increased CIR for all Small Business Fibre plans to 5Mb (up/down); and increased CIR for all Small Business Hyperfibre plans to 10Mb (up/down) – to offer more support businesses who want to eliminate data degradation on certain key collaboration applications such as VoIP, video conferencing and cloud connectivity.
• Improved Business Restore SLAs – we will shorten the SLA for restoration from 7pm to 6pm on the same day for all Small Business Fibre, Small Business Hyperfibre, Business Hyperfibre, and NGA Business plans. While not a dramatic enhancement, alongside our other measures, we feel this will contribute to an overall improvement in reducing business downtime due to network outages.
• Improved Business Restore reporting – while we all know that Business Restore SLAs are superior to standard restoration, this report will illustrate what this looks like in terms of average hours to restoration. For the vast majority of businesses, every hour offline will cost money, and every hour back online gets their business back up and running effectively. This report will show monthly average time to restoration for business restore plans versus standard restore plan, to help businesses better understand the value of being on a prioritised service with SME Business Fibre plans.
• One year trial offer – one free Critical Response (CR) for Small Business Hyperfibre and Business Hyperfibre plans (12 months only) – while we know the SLAs via Business Restore are great, and we almost always meet them, our data shows that when our service company technicians get to site faster, often the restoration time is even better. So, we are proposing a 12-month trial on any Small Business Hyperfibre or Business Hyperfibre connection for CR. If there is a network issue, and the customer has real urgency to get the fastest response possible, then they can request our CR service. The offer provides x1 free CR per 12m period on these plans, per customer connection. There will be a fair use clause in this trial offer, as the intention is that customers only invoke the one free CR per annum in urgent cases. After one successful application of CR, any subsequent CR on that connection will have to pay the normal fee, as will other business plans not included in this trial (currently $819.54 - and increasing on 1 January 2025 to $861.55).

Next steps  

We believe that business fibre is a great way for Kiwi businesses to connect to their online tools, collaborate, drive productivity, and optimise their outcomes. We hope that you will see these SME business fibre enhancements as an indication of our ongoing efforts to give businesses optimal connectivity.

We expect to deliver these SME enhancements to market early/mid 2025. We will share the finalised plan with timelines with the industry, along with more details of each of these SME enhancements for Chorus business fibre.

Contact

If you have any questions, please contact your Customer Engagement team, or Jeremy Lane – SME Portfolio Lead.