Telecom Announces Ihug And Orcon To Trial UBS

Telecom Announces Ihug And Orcon To Trial UBS

Telecom has agreed with ihug and Orcon to take part in a one month trial of Telecom’s Unbundled Bitstream Service (UBS), which will be commercially launched in mid September.

The trial will commence on 16 August and end on 14 September 2004.

Telecom Wholesale Manager of Strategy and Planning, Martin Butler, said the objective of the trial is to test the UBS service and establish satisfactory provisioning, connectivity, billing and support procedures.

“Telecom has worked closely with both Orcon and ihug over the past few weeks to develop their plans to migrate some of their customers to the trial UBS service,” Mr Butler said.

“This trial provides a great opportunity for us to turn months of planning into reality and complete the final fine tuning of the UBS service before it becomes commercially available,” he said.

During the past two months Telecom Wholesale has been meeting with ISPs and other carriers throughout New Zealand to outline the service and receive their feedback.

“Our expectation is that a small number of customers will be in a position to launch their own UBS-based services shortly after UBS becomes commercially available on 15 September,” Mr Butler said.

“Telecom has made a commitment to expand the broadband market to reach 250,000 customers by the end of next year and we expect the wholesale market to deliver up to 30 per cent of that total.”

“With the launch date for UBS now only a few weeks away we have now considerably intensified our work with ISPs to allow them to develop their own products and services which will ultimately drive the widespread uptake of broadband in New Zealand.”

ENDS

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