New Zealand: Vodafone outlines NZ $50m (£20.0m/€25.3m) broadband investments
30 May 2008
Following heavy criticism in a recent New Zealand Institute report that highlighted the lack of investment in broadband by all market participants, with the exception of Telecom New Zealand (TNZ), Vodafone New Zealand issued a statement highlighting a number of its broadband investments.
Mark Rushworth, Marketing Officer at Vodafone New Zealand, subsequently confirmed the operator will be making a NZ $50m (£20.0m/€25.3m) investment in what it calls the “red network”, a programme of local loop unbundling (LLU).
The company said it has already unbundled five exchanges as part of a contract with Huawei to install VDSL2 digital subscriber line access multiplexers (DSLAMs) in 15 of TNZ’s exchanges by mid-2008. Once this is complete, Vodafone will immediately offer VDSL2 broadband to up to 20% of the market, and ADSL2+ services with a maximum of 24Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream to the remaining 80%.
By the end of 2008, the operator also plans to unbundle all 42 exchanges in Auckland, as well as a further 20 exchanges in other centres.
“ We are currently installing ‘super IP [Internet Protocol]’ DSLAMs from Huawei into the first 15 exchanges to be unbundled. We’ve already completed the first five of these. These DSLAMs are ‘super’ because in the one cabinet they translate the plain old telephone call into IP, deliver ADSL2+ broadband, and deliver VDSL2 broadband. This truly is a next-generation network.”
─ David Diprose, General Manager of Technology, Vodafone New Zealand.
Paul Brislen, a spokesman for Vodafone, said the company plans to launch its own “superfast” fixed-line broadband product by mid-2008, and the VSDL2 equipment will serve around a fifth of Vodafone’s unbundled customers. “What we are expecting to see is ‘real world’ download speeds of 50Mbps down and 30Mbps up”, said Brislen.
He added that the increased speeds will mean that customers could exceed the monthly data caps offered by most internet plans “within minutes”, and that Vodafone intends to invest in improved backhaul to connect Telecom’s exchanges in order to raise data caps.
[Vodafone, 14 March 2008; NZ Infotech Weekly, 31 March 2008; Computerworld, 28 May 2008.]
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