Our most recent Business Research 2024 highlighted some areas that New Zealand businesses value. Following this, we consulted with the industry on some proposed Chorus SME business fibre enhancements. After assessing the feedback, which was generally very positive, we can now advise a date of 5 May 2025 for delivery of these enhancements, so that you can plan to align your offerings with these, if you so choose.

Here are the enhancements that we will 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. The initial MRC will be $76.00 to make it competitively priced between SBF920 ($71.19) and SBHF2G ($79.90).
• 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 support businesses who want to eliminate data degradation on certain key collaborative applications such as VoIP, video conferencing and cloud connectivity.
• Improved Restoration SLAs – we will shorten the SLA for restoration from 7pm to 6pm on the same day for faults reported before midday for all Small Business Fibre, Small Business Hyperfibre, Business Hyperfibre, and NGA Business plans. Alongside our other measures, we anticipate that this will contribute to an overall improvement in reducing business downtime due to network outages.
• Improved Restoration reporting – that shows ‘average time to restore’ on business vs. standard plans. For most businesses, every hour offline will cost money, and this reporting will demonstrate the advantage of being on plans that take this into account in the support that is provided.  
• One free Critical Response (CR) for Small Business Hyperfibre and Business Hyperfibre plans (12-month trial only) – while we know the service levels via Business Fibre are great, our data shows that when our service company technicians get to site faster, often the restoration time is even better. Therefore, we are offering 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 one free CR per 12-month period on these plans, per customer connection. This trial offer will be subject to a fair use condition, 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 (which is priced currently $861.55).

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. These SME business fibre enhancements demonstrate our ongoing efforts to give businesses optimal connectivity.

Next steps  

You can make any necessary changes to your business fibre offerings to take full advantage of the new plan and features for the SME market in New Zealand.  

Contact

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