There are practical reasons for the shift. June’s round of bandwidth boosts is billed as helping to accommodate our ever-growing thirst for data – which they certainly will.
Chorus says average household data use has risen 13-fold to 650 gigabytes a month, which will hit 1000GB in a couple of years with the rise and rise of Netflix and other streamers, online gaming, Zoom calls and, more recently, a spike in live sports streaming.
But there’s also a commercial motivation.
Chorus is currently in 72% of fibre-ready homes, Forsyth Barr analysts Aaron Ibbotson and Benjamin Crozier said in a February 8 note.
It wants to boost that share to 80% by 2030 – primarily by converging fixed wireless users to fibre, Ibbotson and Crozier said.
Spark is the biggest player in the fixed-wireless market, where a mobile network to replace a landline connection for a home or small business, cutting Chorus – and its clip of the ticket – out of the loop.
The number of fixed wireless customers rose from 27,000 in 2016 to 398,000 in 2024.
It’s been a boom for fixed wireless leader Spark as it keeps 100% of a month’s broadband bill rather than giving about half to Chorus.
But recently, fixed wireless growth has been flattening. In part, that’s because the low-hanging fruit of copper line users attracted to cheaper fixed wireless is gone, or at least nearly dried up. There were now some 15,000 people left on copper lines in urban areas.
And it’s partly because over the past couple of years, Chorus has targetted fixed wireless with its keenly-priced Home Fibre Starter plan – which will now hold even more appeal, if retailers do pass on double the speed at no extra cost.
Ibbotson and Crozier – who downgraded Spark to underperform on February 8, based on a range of factors – are picking that fixed wireless connections will peak at 413,000 next year “and decline thereafter”.
The Forbarr pair say so far Chorus has succeeded in stalling the fixed-wireless surge as it has signed up 70,000 to its Home Starter Fibre plans in short order. Its challenge now is to reverse it and make gains for fibre.
Over the past six months, Chorus has also started running aggressive ads highlighting potential congestion and other drawbacks of fixed wireless.
The campaign has added frisson by dint of Chorus' new chief executive, Mark Aue, joining the company from 2degrees.
Expect more noise in June as the fibre speed boosts kick in.
A new bottleneck?
Faster fibre broadband will be squandered if you’ve got creaky old home networking hardware that can’t handle the extra grunt.
“A major cause of in-home bottlenecks that’s often overlooked is old Wi-Fi routers. Faster, seamless broadband is better enabled by the latest Wi-Fi technology,” says Chorus network strategy manager Kurt Rodgers.
“So if yours is more than a few years old – it might be time to look at upgrading. Consumer NZ has provided some great advice on the different Wi-Fi technologies I highly recommend checking out.”
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
