Chorus is aligning its processes to provide consistency in how we treat infill properties that require communal fibre infrastructure build. This means that from 2 November 2020, Chorus will begin charging end customers for building the communal fibre infrastructure to infills when the request for a new connection comes through from a retail service provider. 

Why are we doing this

Infills are new premises or subdivisions which were constructed after the completion of fibre rollout in an area. For the best end customer experience, the communal fibre infrastructure to the boundary should be built before the end customer places an order for fibre. To support this, Chorus’ standard process for providing communal fibre infrastructure to new buildings and subdivisions requires property developers to contact our new Property Development team before the house is built.

However, we are finding that a number of new properties are not following this process. As a result, the number of addresses that do not have communal fibre infrastructure available prior to the house being built is increasing. This means that when end customers place an order with their retail service provider, we are unable to immediately provide connectivity due to communal fibre infrastructure not being in place. 

What’s changing

We are now introducing a charge for building communal fibre infrastructure to the boundary.

Currently, when these end customers come through a Service Provider for a fibre connection, Chorus builds the communal fibre infrastructure to the boundary at no charge. On the other hand, infill requests that come directly to Chorus via our New Property Development team incur a charge for the communal fibre infrastructure build.

We are aligning our processes to provide consistency to our customers and encourage property developers to follow the correct process and contact Chorus at the right time to get their new development reticulated with communal fibre.

Infill charges will not be applicable for less than four premises in UFB 2 areas, in line with both the Reference Offer and NIPA 2, which aligns to Chorus charging for new property developments in UFB2 areas. These orders will proceed through provisioning as they do today.

In all other cases, once Chorus has identified an order as an infill, we will place the order on hold and notify you that it is an infill. We will contact the end customer directly to inform them of the next steps and associated charges. The end customer will have 90 days to respond to us. Once the customer agrees to the T&Cs and makes the payment, we will build the communal infrastructure to their boundary. We will subsequently complete the NGA Install at no charge as we do today.

You will be able to contact our fibre Provisioning team for any updates on the order status via the Chorus Portal. If the end-customer doesn’t wish to proceed or refuses payment, we will cancel the service request and send a Chorus Portal update accordingly.

Next steps

We are looking to launch this change by 2 November 2020.

If you have any questions, please contact your Account Manager to discuss this further.