Telstraclear says a new high-speed broadband network will be available to Dunedin businesses by December.
The company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars installing 140 new cabinets in business districts around New Zealand, including Dunedin, in recent months to prepare for the unveiling of VDSL2 broadband.
Yesterday, TelstraClear spokesman Chris Mirams confirmed the work was all but complete and the new network - operating independently of Telecom's hardware - would be available to business customers in the city sometime in December.
"It's really just in the inner city because we are really focusing on businesses. That's who really gets the benefits of it."
VDSL2 would not become a consumer product for residential users until sometime next year, he believed.
The new network was expected to bring speeds of up to 30 megabits per second (Mbps) downstream and seven megabits per second upstream, at a cost of $399.99 per month, he said.
Other packages would start from $49.99 per month, with monthly data caps of between one gigabyte (GB) and 20GB.
TelstraClear head of business Brenda Stonestreet said the VDSL2 network would target medium-to-large businesses connecting to server farms, running high definition video-conferencing or shifting large data files.
However, NHNZ general manager John Crawford, of Dunedin, told the Otago Daily Times the offering could suit smaller businesses, but doubted it would appeal to companies shifting large volumes of material abroad over the Internet.
"The problem, even with small businesses, is the [data] cap. Any cap at all is a bad thing in our view.
"We would use 20gig [GB] in a couple of days," he said.
TelstraClear's announcement follows the roll-out of Telecom's new ADSL2+ network, which aimed to bring speeds of up to 24Mbps to 99% of homes across New Zealand by 2011.
In Dunedin, 38,500 customers were expected to have access to the network by the end of the year.
And, earlier this month, Aurora Energy Ltd unveiled plans for a multimillion-dollar municipal fibre network linking the city's council buildings, key businesses, educational facilities and Dunedin Hospital.
The council-controlled organisation has applied for a $3 million slice of the Government's $340 million broadband investment fund.
