FIBRE BROADBAND: THE FACTS

Ultra-Fast Broadband will enable everyday New Zealanders to enjoy better health services, improve the way our children are educated, and will provide access to enhanced content and applications to benefit our lives.

There is also a well-documented correlation between broadband reach and business productivity. New Zealand is a remote country, so our ability to remain competitive in a global marketplace, and overcome our size and isolation, is inextricably linked to the quality of our broadband telecommunications infrastructure.

Broadband is a technology that allows data to be transmitted at high speeds between the internet or applications on computers in the ‘cloud’ and your computer or mobile phone. It allows a greater volume of data to be transmitted much more quickly than dial-up internet because it can handle a greater range of frequencies.

Fibre-optic cable is made up of numerous strands of pure glass that transmit data via light signals. Effectively, each strand, which is as thin as a human hair, is a beam of light of a specific colour. Glass has a higher bandwidth, it  is more reliable over long distances and it is less prone to interference than copper. Fibre is also thinner and lighter than copper, and enables data to be transmitted digitally – which is the natural form of computer-generated data – rather than in analogue form. It is because the data is transmitted using digital pulses of light that the performance is largely unaffected by distance, meaning that it doesn’t matter how far you are from the exchange, the speed of the broadband will be the same.

Copper has been around for more than 100 years, and over this time its bandwidth has increased markedly. However, it is nearing the end of its useful life-cycle and reaching its limit. Fibre, on the other hand, is only at the beginning of its life-cycle and it is already delivering bandwidths several hundred times greater than copper. The truly exciting thing is the application and services – some existing, some yet to be invented – that will run over this additional bandwidth. This is why we encourage you to move to fibre.

To put these numbers in context, let’s use a standard 130-minute movie download. To download this on a dial-up connection, you’d need to allow 28 hours. It would take about 20 minutes on your average internet connection in New Zealand today. But once we get UFB, you’ll be done in under one minute.

To read more on the benefits of Ultra-Fast Broadband and switching to fibre, visit Our FIbre Network or view the link below.