Spark has launched its Gigatown plans, targeting Dunedin residents who have already expressed their interest in the company's plans and/or have already signed up to Spark's Gigatown plans.
Spark, formerly Telecom, has been late to the party with other internet service providers already offering ultra-fast fibre plans for Gigatown residents.
Spark home, mobile and business chief executive Chris Quin said Dunedin customers in the Gigatown footprint could now sign up to any of Spark's Gigatown ultra fibre plans with fibre landline or as a naked broadband service.
''To date, we've had a number of Dunedin customers sign up to our pre-launch Gigatown plans. Over the next few days and weeks we'll be proactively contacting these customers to see if they'd like us to arrange for them to move on to one of our new plans.''
The new plans released yesterday were: ultra fibre with fibre landline Gigatown plans for Dunedin only (up to 1Gbps download and up to 500Mbps upload), $99 for 80GB and $109 for unlimited.
Naked broadband plans for Dunedin only are $79 for 80GB and $99 for unlimited, again both new plans.
Mr Quin said fast fibre had never been more attractive to customers as the cost of the new plans started to line up with Spark's ADSL and VDSL broadband plans.
The internet TV market had taken off this year.
''We think this will fast become the way mainstream New Zealanders watch TV and movies. This change in behaviour, and the continued growth in online gaming, music streaming and social media, means more of our customers are demanding the speeds fibre can offer, combined with larger - or unlimited - data allowances,'' he said.
Figures released yesterday by Communications Minister Amy Adams showed the UFB roll-out in Otago and Southland was 50% complete, ahead of Canterbury on 46% and the West Coast on 12%, but behind Nelson-Marlborough, which was 65% complete.
Overall, 46% of the build was completed, within budget and ahead of schedule.
Ms Adams said there was a 23% increase in the number of end users connecting to UFB in the three months ended March. The quarterly results for the Governments UFB and Rural Broadband Initiative programmes showed more than 618,000 homes, workplaces and schools were now able to connect to the UFB network. However, uptake was only 13.8% across the country, taking the total number of end users connected to the network to 85,544.
Schools were a top priority for the Government. The programme target for schools was now 93% complete with more than 2300 schools across New Zealand with high-speed broadband ready for service, the minister said.
Under the Rural Broadband Initiative, nearly 80% of tower upgrades were now complete. In the last quarter, nearly 1.8 millon unique Vodafone customers access mobile services from the 113 new towers build since the start of the programme.
An estimated 239,000 households and businesses were able to connect to fixed wireless RBI from new and upgraded towers.
More than 85,000 lines had been upgraded by Chorus under the RBI to receive new or improved faster copper-based broadband, Ms Adams said.
Labour communications spokeswoman Clare Curran said while it was great 85,000 were connected to UFB, there were thousands more who wanted to connect who were being left waiting for months and even more than a year.
Ms Curran told the Otago Daily Times she was trying to extract some figures from Crown Fibre Holdings.
The Telecommunications Forum, a representative group of all the telcos, estimated about a third of households fell into the non-standard installation category. Those were the households which were on the backburner and the too hard basket creating major headaches.
''The remedies for this lie in greater efficiencies but also in some law changes which the Government has been slow to act on. They require changes to easements through the Resource Management Act.''
There was difficulty in getting consents from third-party property owners, as identified recently by the ODT.
Environment Minister Nick Smith was understood to be taking a paper to Cabinet regarding better access, Ms Curran said.
