New Zealand’s mobile market continues to undergo significant developments. There have been considerable gains made in LTE services, with effective competition between Spark, Vodafone NZ and the country’s third mobile operator 2degrees. Although LTE geographic coverage remains relatively poor, data collected in February 2016 by OpenSignal found that New Zealand retains the second highest overall LTE data speed, behind Singapore.

Mobile market penetration, at around 123% by early 2016, is growing steadily as customers make greater use of cheaper bundled offerings and mobile data services. Growth is also being stimulated by wider coverage provided under the RBI.

Vodafone New Zealand has announced plans to upgrade its cable networks in Wellington and Christchurch to DOCSIS 3.1 technology to provide gigabit download speeds. The NZD22 million (USD15 million) project will see the first customers gaining access to the new ultra-high speed services in mid-2016. Equipment for the rollout is being provided by Huawei. Vodafone has declared that upon completion of the upgrade, every premise within reach of the network will have access to 1Gbps plans at affordable prices. Vodafone’s ultra-fast broadband network footprint in Wellington covers all of the central business district (CBD) and surrounding suburbs, including the Kapiti coastal region, while in Christchurch the network covers the CBD and surrounding suburbs. The firm inherited the cable systems when it acquired TelstraClear in 2012.

Spark (formerly Telecom New Zealand) has commercially launched a new wireless broadband service for urban areas of the country, aimed at users with poor quality fixed DSL internet services. The telco is using its 4G wireless network to target low-to-moderate usage households which currently have slow broadband connections due to the distance from their nearest DSL-enabled exchange and who are not passed by high speed fibre infrastructure.

The new ‘Home Wireless Broadband’ service will be rolled out to cities and towns across the country and follows the launch of a similar offering aimed at rural areas in July last year; the firm says Rural Wireless Broadband has now signed up some 30,000 subscribers. There are three tariff options for the new urban service: NZD79.99 (USD54.30) a month for 40GB of internet bandwidth and a landline with free local calls; NZD89.99 a month for 80GB of bandwidth and free local calls; or NZD84.99 for a ‘naked’ 80GB internet service without a landline.

Key developments:

• Spark pays $9 million for a 70MHz block of spectrum in the 2.3GHz band;
• Vodafone New Zealand commercializes dual-band CA LTE service;
• Spark and Vodafone deploy 700MHz LTE wireless broadband in rural areas;
• 2degrees reports strong growth in revenue, acquires the ISP Snap to enter the fixed-mobile convergence market;
• Vodafone teams with Netflix to provide content on smartphones, reports 4.4% drop in revenue for FY2015;