2degrees expands 4G into Wellington

2degrees has gone live with its 4G network in Wellington this morning.

Around half the city is covered (see maps right).

The carrier has also expanded its Auckland 4G footprint from the CBD (where it launched in June) to cover three quarters of the city. West Auckland and North Shore sites have gone live today (see coverage maps here).

2degrees has been playing catchup with Vodafone, which launched its 4G network in February last year and Spark, which went live in October.

The company says its 4G upgrade allows customers can get mobile data ten times faster than 3G — and in testing, NBR found a very snappy 68Mbit/s down an 17Mbit/s up (with the proviso that mobile broadband testing is something of a dark art. Results depend on the number of people on the network at the time, distance to the nearest cell site and other variables).

The company plans to launch 4G in Christchurch at the end of September and Hamilton in October.

The company continues to trial other technology to support its customers insatiable demand for data including a wi-fi trial in Wellington and a 4G trial on 700MHz in central Auckland (Telecom and Vodafone have already gone live with 4G on the more commercially attractive 700MHz. The pair have also introduced new technologies to turbocharge 4G — carrier aggregation technology in Telecom's case and dual carrier in Vodafone's. 2degrees has no immediate plans on that front).

Telecom and Vodafone bought more 700MHz spectrum than 2degrees at the government' "digital dividend" auction earlier this year.

But 2degrees CEO Stewart Sherriff recently told NBR his company has all the spectrum it needs for a comprehensive nationwide network upgrade.

So why was 2degrees sore at the government? Mr Sherriff says the Crown should have left some of the spectrum on the shelf and sold it at a later date when it would have fetched a higher price. Deeper-pocketed Telecom and Vodafone have more 4G-friendly spectrum, which means they need fewer cell towers for their rollouts — an conversely 2degrees needs more, increasing its costs.

ckeall@nbr.co.nz

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