Chorus speeds up home fibre broadband plans substantially

Technology / news

Is the end of fixed wireless nigh? Chorus gooses up its most popular fibre broadband plans

12th Feb 25, 9:48am by Juha Saarinen

Fibre optic cable. Picture credit: iStock

New Zealand's biggest Ultrafast Broadband wholesaler Chorus has just announced that it will substantially increase the speed of its most popular fibre to the home plans in June, by a substantial amount.

The Fibre 50 and this includes the Home Fibre Starter plan, will double in speed to 100 megabits/s (Mbps) downstream, and 20 Mbps upstream.

Meanwhile, the most popular residential plan will go from 300/100 Mbps to 500/100 Mbps. Some 700,000 households will be upgraded by their retail service providers, with subscription charges presumably remaining the same as before.

Chorus says broadband customers use increasing amounts of data, standing at around 650 gigabytes per month currently. Its forecasts are one terabyte (1000 GB) a month by 2029.

The chief executive of Chorus, Mark Aue who took over the leadership of the network infrastructure builder in February last year, pointed to New Zealanders expecting high speed connections that are reliable with consistent performance.

This is for streaming video in 4K over the Internet, social media, games and other applications that demand high speeds and low latency for the best user experience.

The speed upgrades will most likely mean fixed-wireless plans from telcos become less attractive in areas with fibre to the home coverage. For example, Spark's 4G fixed-wireless is advertised as having 65/18 Mbps speeds, costing $50 (50 GB/month), $60 (150 GB/month) and $65 (unlimited, with "fair usage policy"). Fixed-wireless plans using the newer 5G technology are faster, advertised by Spark as having been measured at 356/52 Mbps.

Likewise, the current 900/500 Mbps fibre plans from Internet providers could be cannibalised by 500/100 Mbps plans, unless subscribers decide they need the higher upload speeds.

There is a regulatory twist for Chorus wholesale UFB plans. Spokesperson Nathan Beaumont explained that its broadband anchor product which runs at 100/20 Mbps is still available, "because we are required to offer it under the anchor regulations".

"So, the regulated plan hasn’t changed, but the plan that is the same price but higher speeds as the regulated plan has been upgraded. And customers choose to be on the 300, soon to be 500, plan rather than the anchor," Beaumont said.

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21 Comments

by finite | 12th Feb 25, 10:34am 1739309653

To think there was a time when I was happy to have a 9600 bps modem connection. Enough for email - without embedded pictures and video.

by Nzdan | 12th Feb 25, 10:42am 1739310150

Lived 8km from the exchange. Recall the connection speed "lottery", disconnecting and reconnecting until I got a speed I was happy with.

Then came along 128k DSL, was happy with that except for the 10 gigabyte data cap. As plans got faster, that data cap annoyingly remained the same.

by interesting1234 | 13th Feb 25, 7:43am 1739385786

Back in ye old days where it took 45min to download 4.5Mb and that's if you were lucky enough that someone didn't need the phone or was expecting a call.

by Hamish | 13th Feb 25, 9:28am 1739392130

Back in the old days, you could send a letter or a postcard and if within the same delivery region would be 90+% likely delivered the next day.

Today?

by K.W. | 12th Feb 25, 10:58am 1739311094

Time to speak to the Minister of Regulation about removing that 100 Mbps plan. It costs more to rate limit a circuit than it does to allow unthrottled access. Leave the low end plans to wireless providers.

by Nzdan | 12th Feb 25, 11:46am 1739314014

Not necessarily. Rate limiting makes sense when you're provisioning bandwidth. Providers at each end of the Southern Cross cable charge a rate for bandwidth. Depends on the peering agreements, but let's say it's 10gbit for $5k per month.

You put 100 x 100mbit users in that bandwidth pool and it's $50 per connection per user (there'll be a sharing factor/contention ratio because not everyone uses the internet at the same time).

Removing the 100mbps plan could mean you go from 100 users @ 100mbit to 10 users @ 1gbit. Either costs go up as you provision more international bandwidth, or your contention ratios become really tight and everyone's internet just runs at 100mbit anyway due to network saturation.

by K.W. | 12th Feb 25, 12:28pm 1739316480

There are additional costs that sit in the rating and billing engines over and above the circuit bandwidth costs. Also the additional support costs for moves, adds and changes. As someone who used to do the financial modelling for broadband plans, I know where the costs sit for telcos. But rate limited plans were introduced in order to not cannibalise high speed business plans, even though they were more expensive. As consumer and business plans merge in terms of cost and bandwidth, the justification for maintaining low end plans disappears, other than for regulatory reasons (which no longer exist if the plan price is the same for both). The less artificially restricted plans you offer, the lower your cost. But yes, the outcome would be higher contention ratios (which is preferable for the provider but not the consumer).

by Nzdan | 12th Feb 25, 2:08pm 1739322491

Thanks, make sense. In a perfect world you'd have separate bandwidth pools to avoid cannibalizing the business plans, but back then some ISPs were notorious for oversubscribing (Vodafone/Slingshot/Xtra). Imagine it was all too easy to quietly spill some residential capacity into the underutilized business pool, potentially in breach of their contractual obligations with their business customers.

by K.W. | 12th Feb 25, 2:23pm 1739323390

Nowadays a business plan is sold on the basis of having better uptime, redundancy, guaranteed minimum speeds to international locations, and SLAs rather than bandwidth. But even that is getting harder to differentiate as fibre is very reliable (especially where its been undergrounded).

by BadRobot | 12th Feb 25, 3:37pm 1739327826

It depends on what type of connection. A business may have a connection to the Internet or a WAN service. An internet connection is a direct connection to the Internet whereas a WAN service generally uses MPLS or SDWAN and connects a site to a data centre which has a gateway connection to the Internet. Individual sites may not have a direct connection to the Internet.

by Chaosinflesh | 12th Feb 25, 12:52pm 1739317928

Rate limits are there as an easy way to reduce the cost of excessive users. When ADSL first rolled out, it was noticed that just 5 users in Wellington accounted for most of the use. Caps went on shortly after that - but stayed on way too long thereafter. Slowing down how long it takes average Joe to download a file doesn't stop the file being downloaded, just the amount of files downloaded.

I want to say that, aside from the most ardent file/media sharing type, the easily available streaming platforms should have made bandwidth much easier to predict - I only have so many hours of the day available to watch TV! But then I remembered a lot of platforms are built on p2p platforms (the Chinese ones in particular), so that may not be quite correct. ( I used to write bandwidth shaping software ~16 years ago).

by K.W. | 12th Feb 25, 1:07pm 1739318835

All the high speed plans are unlimited data so downloads dont matter anymore. And people on the lowest bandwidth plan are not going to be your biggest downloaders, so there is no point in not shifting them all to the normal base plan. Its just a bit of administrative tidy up that would take some cost out of the telcos, which would benefit users and shareholders.

Meanwhile lets all feel sorry for our mates across the ditch and their copper based NBN service LOL

by Nzdan | 12th Feb 25, 2:20pm 1739323248

Yes NBN is tragic for sure. Imagine signing up for "Fibre" and getting sent a VDSL2 modem. Worse, one of those generic Netcomm NF12s that collapse the TCP stack whenever you have more than a couple of devices accessing at once.

by Chaosinflesh | 12th Feb 25, 2:36pm 1739324188

I don't know about elsewhere, we're probably charmed.

FTTP here. Optus is bad - tried to push FTTN but we insisted on FTTP - we signed up last year, 6 week delay, then the tech didn't show up but logged for 12 days he had. So we dropped em, now Ausssie Broadband - had tech in 2 days, and I helped him run the fibre line from the street's box, which happens to be in our lawn (I run my own custom PON).

Back in NZ, the whole reason we moved from rural to AK was being told by an MP they were going to rely on LEO for rural, rather than allowing us to use the school conduit running past our gate. Starlink wasn't even available to test at that point, and Farmside still required dialup for upload, and we were in a valley (couldn't even get Lightwire).

Chorus stole our 4.2M capable line for a neighbour as it was the best - the tech told me when we complained (dropped to 600k) that he hadn't even considered it was in use further down the valley when he did the swap, and no, I couldn't have it back. Then the forestry guys accidentally took out the whole line the week after we moved!

by Juha Saarinen | 12th Feb 25, 2:33pm 1739324003

This discussion isn't complete without taking into account that most content accessed by users come from CDNs in NZ and Australia, and have done so for some years now.

by The Person | 12th Feb 25, 4:51pm 1739332266

Does a 100Mbs regulatory rate limit cost more to implement than a commercially decided 300Mbs limit?

by K.W. | 13th Feb 25, 12:40am 1739360412

No, its the fact that you have to maintain both 100 and 300 plans. Less plans = lower costs. Ideally you would only want one plan - the 900 Mbps top speed. Then try to migrate users over to the Hyperfibre plans of 2 Gbps and above so you can retire the old non Hyperfibre network equipment.

by sadr001 | 12th Feb 25, 1:52pm 1739321572

How does one go about petitioning to have enable sold to chorus? Hyperfiber has meant that rural NZ towns can end up with upload speeds 16 times faster than most Christchurch suburbs. And now the default data plans in much of Christchurch will be just over half that of rural townships served by chorus!

by K.W. | 12th Feb 25, 2:31pm 1739323904

Enable upgraded users from 100 Mbps to 300 Mbps when Chorus did it, its likely they'll do the same thing this year as its not a difficult change to implement. Hyperfibre requires new transmission gear.

by Sluggy | 12th Feb 25, 4:37pm 1739331421

We have moved to the sticks. Went starlink, $79 a month, unlimited data 450 mbps last time I checked.

We are at the mercy of musk, a risk I'm prepared to take...

by interesting1234 | 13th Feb 25, 7:44am 1739385886

No more sailing Slugster?