The demonstration last week of 25 gigabits per second network connections by Nokia and Chorus shows a laser-focused vision for the future, and means the UFB network won't have to be ripped up and replaced with something else any time soon.
Not that there is anything else currently that could replace passive optical fibre networks in terms of bang for public-private partnership buck.
Chorus and other telco partners are betting that 25 GPON is the sweet spot in three years or so. There's 50 and 100 gigabit/s being mooted as well, but it requires costlier equipment changes.
The 25 GPON system is not available yet, but it can run over the same UFB fibre that other customers get the standard 300/100Mbps or sub-gigabit/s service on.
For most people, gigabits per second doesn't mean anything as such but geeks are either going "wow!" or "what do you need that speed for?"
One person pointed out that if you do get 25Gbps service, you'll never get that speed across the entire Internet-work chain.
That's true, which is why Chorus had to set up its own Ookla Speedtest server to show off the 25 GPON service - there's not many other endpoints that can keep up with such speed.
At the same time, you need to bear in mind that today's Internet isn't architected the same as it was just a few years ago.
Most data and content is delivered from (and to) local or Australian cache servers which are very well connected to New Zealand's Internet.
That scenario provides very low latency too, which further improves performance since the most commonly used Internet protocol uses a delay-sensitive "three-way handshake" to ensure data is transmitted as expected.
Most data lives close to users for fast performance, and this will only continue with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services establishing their cloud computing services in New Zealand. For security and performance reasons, there will be customer demand for direct connections to cloud providers that don't go over the Internet as well.
Like the Hyperfibre UFB service which can be up to 8/8Gbps, you get heaps of headroom for more users with 25 GPON. For organisations that run their applications in the cloud, getting 25Gbps to share among staffers, without paying the ruinously high leased line charges for much slower connections of the past is a real boon.
The proposed 25 GPON service does pose some challenges at the customer end though.
Residential and small business wired Ethernet networks are practically limited to just one gigabit per second speeds.
Faster network interfaces are appearing, but moving up to 10Gbps requires chunky electronics that run very hot currently.
New wireless network technologies like Wifi 6E which is becoming commonly available overseas would help here. Wifi 6E promises link speeds (so not actual throughput) of 9.6Gbps and the upcoming Wifi 7 standard specifies up to 40Gbps.
Unfortunately, the Government is dragging the chain on Wifi 6E even though the consultation round closed a year ago, The Government's Radio Spectrum Management mandarins have ordered Wifi vendors to make sure end users can't enable Wifi 6E currently, in fact.
This is possibly due to telcos wanting access to the additional big chunk of 6GHz radio frequency spectrum that Wifi 6E provides. That bandwidth bump is what gives Wifi 6E its high performance, and telcos would love to snag it for their fixed-wireless 5G service which competes with UFB.
Hardware vendors like Apple, Intel and Qualcomm are on a collision course with telcos over Wifi 6E and it could take a while to resolve, unfortunately.
