Tag: Chorus (New Zealand infrastructure provider)

Article – From the horse’s mouth 

Chorus Broadband NZ

Blog Post

My Comments

Chorus, New Zealand’s broadband infrastructure provider, highlighted why their fibre-to-the-premises broadband setup has been designed to be future-proof.

Here, they highlighted the time when New Zealand acquired colour television and households were getting their claws on to one of the new colour TV sets that were being released. This was concurrent with the 1974 Commonwealth Games being hosted in Christchurch, New Zealand and the Kiwis were wanting to watch this event in living colour. Then they highlighted the up-and-coming 2020 Olympics in Tokyo with the possibility of it being delivered using 8K UHDTV technology thanks to NHK in Japan being able to deliver 8K UHDTV broadcast feeds to broadcasters who have local rights to the event.

But they were mentioning about the feasibility of upgrading their infrastructure from 1Gbps to 10Gbps. They are prototyping such a setup in their Auckland-based Chorus Fibre Experience Lab but came across with the fact that it would only require replacement of the electronics at each end of the connection.

This would be the optical-network terminal in their exchange or street cabinet and the optical-network terminal in your home that connects between the optical fibre and your router’s WAN (Internet) socket. At the time that 10Gbps fibre-optic connectivity is needed, newer and better routers would be offered with a 10Gbps Ethernet connection of some sort on the WAN side, in addition to LAN-side wired and wireless connectivity that suits these expectations. If the exchange-side setup is totally modular, it could allow for a gradual service upgrade initially to those who are after that bandwidth like business users or “tech-head” early adopters.

Some other areas like Hong Kong, Norway, Qatar, and South Korea are dabbling with the 10Gbps fibre-optic idea and offering it as a service. Mostly this is offered by the local ISPs as a premium or business-class service.

But Chorus and other FTTP providers can see other upgrade paths for their fibre-optic services without the need to replace the optical fibre. Here, they could convert from passive-optical-network architecture to active-optical-network architecture to provide full bandwidth to each premises. It also allows the infrastructure to support full quality-of-service for real-time applications like online gaming, IP telephony or video streaming as well as a highly-flexible service for households and businesses.

Chorus are also underscoring the reality that there will be more Internet traffic over their infrastructure especially with the smart home and the Internet Of Things. This is more so if these devices become dependent on cloud services and provide frequently-updated data.

Here, what is being highlighted is the use of futureproof technologies that can allow for long-term investment in the same infrastructure and an upgrade path that costs relatively little to implement.

Article – From the horse’s mouth

Chorus 

Blog Post

My Comments

Previously, I wrote an article about New Zealand having its Internet infrastructure being built around competitive operations and next-generation forward-looking approaches rather than pushing out older copper infrastructure as the backbone.

Chorus are providing fibre-to-the-premises broadband in most of New Zealand’s major urban areas. This is in conjunction with the NZ Government pushing this technology across these areas in conjunction with this wholesale telecoms provider and the local electric utilities, along with the “fibre-to-the-node” fibre-copper deployments in these areas being converted towards FTTP, rather than the traditional wisdom pushed in the UK and Australia of “sweating out” copper infrastructure.

But Chorus were offering Gigabit service as a service option for FTTP customers based in Dunedin. This was initially to prove that Dunedin could be turned in to a “Gigatown” with Gigabit-level Internet service available everywhere. Now they are offering this same level of throughput as a service option for all of their customers who are connected to FTTP services in New Zealand. Here, they are underscoring the desire for New Zealanders to have the whole country become a “Gignation” or “Giganation” where everyone has access to Gigabit broadband speeds.

Here, in the blog article they published, they mentioned the need to offer Gigabit broadband as a service option. This is with the benefit of high throughput with the ability to, for example, upload 25 high-resolution images to Facebook or Dropbox in a second or concurrently stream 40 different ultra-high-resolution videos. For people who work from home, this technology would benefit them especially if they are using cloud-based “…as-a-service” computing approaches or desiring high-reliability IP-based voice and video telecommunications.

At the moment, they offer a headline speed of 1Gbps download and 500Mbps upload but could work better by offering a symmetrical 1Gbps speed as a service option. This kind of service offering is being made available by some service providers such as Gigaclear in the UK and could heavily please small-business owners.

They also raised the issue of popular Web services being oversubscribed which could impair the perceived performance along with your home network being equipped with older or less-reliable hardware. They also highlighted the fact that speedtests may not hit the headline speed exactly and reckon that you should be able to have close to that for the download speed at least.

Here, New Zealand is proving that home and small-business networks can be connected to Gigabit-level fibre-optic Internet service that is forward-thinking.