New Zealand's Fiber Rollout

UnitedNetworks, a power utility in New Zealand, is running fiber optic cable through urban gas ducts. The company expects the service to be ready in February, 2001.

by Keith Newman of nz.internet.com [November 21, 2000]

Electricity and gas company UnitedNetworks sees itself as a new breed of convergence network provider as it prepares to lay fiber optic cable throughout central Auckland and Wellington business districts.

The former Power New Zealand acquired gas company Orion earlier this year, and is running 1Gbit/sec (and faster) fiber through the gas ducts.

UnitedNetworks is investing $30 million in the new fiber optic cabling which links directly into the Southern Cross cable. It'll be ready for its first commercial customers in February of 2001.

Convergers converge on optic opportunity
CEO Don Warnock claims there's likely to be a shift in the market with retailers of gas and power also moving into telecommunications. "Right now the telecommunications companies are into everything including content and television but we believe over time they'll have to make decisions about where they really want to be."

The new network is being pitched as an independent wholesale operation. Interest has come from large businesses and the major carriers.

"New Zealanders like the technology advances but haven't had the infrastructure to take advantage of it," says Warnock. "It'll start in the CBDs with application service providers (ASPs) renting software extend to video conferencing and then eventually streaming video data out to the home."

He suggests competition hasn't been strong enough locally because of Telecom's dominance and the fact that Telecom and others have legacy networks to deal with. "If they bring in high bandwidth they're going to have to write off some investment."

Mr Warnock says there's no doubt city centers are facing a shortage of high-speed capacity. While standard wide area networking speeds were moving up from 2Mbit.sec to 10Mbit/sec there was a huge leap forward to Gigabit per second networks linked to Southern Cross. "We think the time is right for New Zealand to really take advantage of this," he says.

While there is technology which can extend its network out through the telephone lines Mr Warnock says it hasn't proven totally reliable as yet but it could be an opportunity for the future. "We're connected into all the urban and rural areas but the technology still have a way to go to help deal with New Zealand's digital divide," he says.

Competition in the city
UnitedNetworks will be up against another independent fiber provider CityLink which began work on a multimillion dollar fiber optic ring to help ease Auckland's bandwidth congestion a month ago.

CityLink  is currently trenching to lay a fiber optic ring capable of 10 Gbit/sec capacity around Auckland's central business district. Phase one of the network is expected to be live by late November. The network will be rolled out over 18 months and can be expanded to house up to 1000 fibers.

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