New Zealand expanding national fiber network

The New Zealand government plans to extend its Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) national fiber network to 190 more small towns.

The government has announced plans to spend NZ$130 million ($93.4 million) to extend the network to 60,000 new households and businesses across the nation and complete the UFB deployment by 2022.

A further NZ$130 million will be spent to expand the concurrent Rural Broadband Initiative (UFB) to bring non-fiber broadband to another 74,000 rural premises, and to extend mobile coverage to an extra 1,000km of rural highways as part of the Mobile Black Spot Fund.

The RBI involves a combination of upgrades to existing fixed line infrastructure and fixed wireless infrastructure.

“We started UFB in 2010 with the original goal of connecting 34 towns to world-class fibre-to-the-premises. Earlier this year we expanded it to 200 more towns and today’s announcement will bring us to 390,” New Zealand communications minister Simon Bridges commented.