The quarterly report released this week said UFB is available to 52 percent of the households or businesses in Auckland. The figure has increased by four percent from 48 percent in the previous quarter.
In the capital city of Wellington, UFB coverage is at 50 percent while it is higher in Christchurch at 67 percent.
The report on the rollout of high-speed Internet, released by Communications Minister Amy Adams, also showed that nearly 25 percent of the households or businesses in Auckland were already connected to the UFB.
The report also showed that all homes and businesses in 19 out of 33 towns and cities across the country can now have access to the UFB. This means faster broadband is now available to 2.4 million New Zealanders or to around one million homes, businesses and schools in the country. New Zealand has a population of 4.7 million.
Adams said this development was an “outstanding achievement this far into the build.”
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According to the Broadband Deployment Update, phase one of the UFB and the Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) targets 97.8 percent of New Zealanders to have a faster broadband by the end of 2019, when Internet speed can peak to as high as 100 megabits per second.
“At the end of the first phase of the RBI, 90% of homes and businesses (outside UFB areas) have access to broadband at peak speeds of at least 5 Mbps,” the report said.
“This is through fixed wireless and improved copper services (some rural homes and businesses will be able to choose between the two services). The RBI is also extending mobile coverage to rural areas across New Zealand.”
Adams also hailed the Akamai State of the Internet report showing the country’s average speed had increased to 10.5 mbps in the first quarter of 2016, an increase of 25 percent from the previous year’s figure.
“This is a considerable improvement on the speeds New Zealanders are enjoying every day. To put these speeds into context, in 2008 the average speed was 2.7 mbps. The latest figures from early 2016 show an almost four-time increase as New Zealanders embrace connectivity fuelled by the Government’s Ultra-Fast Broadband and Rural Broadband Initiative programs,” Adams said.
New Zealand has one of the fastest Internet speeds in Asia-Pacific, outranking even neighboring Australia, according to the recent Akamai report.
Mark Gregory, a network engineering expert at RMIT University in Melbourne, explained last year that New Zealand’s faster Internet speed was largely due to its decision to stay with the fiber-to-the-home network.
“The key difference between New Zealand and Australia is that New Zealand made the decision to do fiber-to-the-premise, they’ve stuck with that decision,” he said.
