We’ve been testing new ways to get homes fibre-ready before an order’s even placed. This means that we complete their free fibre installation, then leave them still connected to copper. These customers can then upgrade to fibre whenever they’re ready.

We’ve made great progress in Hokitika and Auckland’s Half Moon Bay, and want to share our results.

Hokitika

We told you about the Hokitika trial in May this year. The trials to date have been promising, with 70% of the customers we spoke to taking up a ‘fibre ready’ installation. Uptake remains high, as we extend our UFB2 network to the ~1,800 premises here. This trial continues to the middle of 2018. Its findings will inform our approach to UFB2.

We are still working with Crown Infrastructure to get the UFB2 reference offer updated and in the interim you can order services in Hokitika on the terms of the UFB1 reference offer.  We expect to complete this process in the next couple of weeks.

Half Moon Bay

We announced some small scale trials in July this year. We ran a small trial in Auckland’s Half Moon Bay, to test if customers inside our UFB footprint with a copper connection would value being 'fibre ready'. Over 40% of the customers we contacted agreed to an install, and a quarter of these customers have now moved to fibre. We intend to run further small scale trials in other fibre areas, and aim to increase uptake further.

Next steps                                                                      

We’d obviously like the customers who are now 'fibre ready' in Half Moon Bay to upgrade as soon as possible, so we've now posted a list of these addresses on our website.

You’ll find 40 addresses on this report now. We’ll be adding more in the coming weeks as we complete more fibre ready installs. We’ll refresh this list at the beginning of each week, as addresses are added or removed (once upgraded).

For more information, please contact your service delivery manager.