Gigatown winner Dunedin gets one gig UFB service today ... for some

As the winning town in Chorus' Gigatown competition, Dunedin gets superfast UFB fibre at a low price from today (plus $700,000 in community and development funds).

All internet service running over UFB fibre is fast. But Dunedinites will get "one gig" plans. That's 1 gigabit (or 1000 megabits) per second of bandwidth. Or, to put it another way, around 100 times faster than the copper line broadband connections most households use today, and 30 times the speed of the cheapest UFB fibre plans.

The promo runs for three years.

There are two qualifications.

One, you have to live in an area of Dunedin that's already covered by the UFB. Chorus spokesman Steve Pettigrew tells NBR, 41% of addresses in the Dunedin UFB coverage area can connect to UFB today and access the retailer gigabit plans. "That’ll climb to 81 per cent by June 2017." UFB take up as at end Dec 2014 in Dunedin was 11.3% against a Chorus UFB average across the country of 11%, Pettigrew says. That is, 11.3% of people with taxpayer-subsidised fibre rolled down their street choose to take a UFB plan.

Two, your ISP has to offer a 1 gig plan. Here, there's a bit of roadblock. Spark, which holds around 50% of the retail market, says it won't have its Gigatown plans ready until mid-year (to compensate, its offering slower UFB plans at a cut rate until then). 

Similarly, Vodafone has signed on for Gigatown, but has yet to reveal pricing for its one gig plans, or when they will go live (at least going into today; NBR has a query in. One the company's message boards, customers are wondering).

ISPs Orcon, MyRepublic, Snap and Wicked Networks have got their 1 gig act together. See their pricing here.

For Dunedinites habitualised to paying $70 or $75 a month for DSL (copper) broadband, paying around $99 for one gig UFB fibre with unlimited data might not seem like winning a competition. But power users will appreciate it's a very, very keen price for all that bandwidth and data.

Now, what to do with it all? NBR is stumped. 100Mbit/s fibre (or a 10th the speed of 1 gig plans) is enough for ultra high definition TV, online gaming and remote working -- all at once, or an small business full of people cloud computing. I'm sure the southerners will think of something.

ckeall@nbr.co.nz

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