Telecommunications Act: Broadband monitoring

Issued 4 February 2005

Telecommunications Act: Broadband monitoring

The Commerce Commission has completed its monitoring, for the quarter ending December 31st 2004, of uptake of residential broadband services provided or supported by Telecom New Zealand Limited.

The Commission commenced its broadband monitoring on July 1st 2004 following Telecom’s announcement earlier that year that it will have no fewer than 250,000 residential broadband connections by the end of 2005; of which more than a third (approximately 83,000) will be resold Jetstream products or wholesaled Bitstream services.

As of 31 December 2004, Telecom achieved 49 percent of its connection target with a total of 122,805 residential broadband connections. Of this number, 7,069 were wholesale connections, which equates to 8.5 percent of Telecom’s wholesale target.

By comparison, at the close of the previous quarter ending 30 September 2004, Telecom had achieved 30 percent of its connection target with a total of 74,449 residential connections. Of this number, 42 were wholesale connections, which equated to 0.05 percent of the Telecom wholesale target.

There are some important differences between the Commission’s numbers and those provided by Telecom in its quarterly report of February 4th, 2005. The Commission does not consider broadband connections under Telecom JetStream Partnering Programme to be wholesale connections for the purposes of its monitoring regime. Such connections have been treated by the Commission as Telecom retail sales. The Commission has also treated 10 connections as retail which Telecom has listed as Wholesale.

The broadband uptake figures as at 31 December 2004 may be broken down by downstream speed as follows: 78,297 connections with downstream speed less than 512Kbps; 107 connections with downstream speed of exactly 512Kbps; and 44,401 connections with downstream speed greater than 512Kbps.

The Commission’s monitoring focuses on residential customers with minimum speeds of 256 Kbps downstream and 128 Kbps upstream. The monitoring will continue until the end of 2005, and the Commission will publish its results quarterly.

ENDS

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