New Zealand’s ultrafast broadband arrived just in time for the worldwide streaming video revolution. The government-supported UFB network build started in late 2011, Netflix officially opened for business in New Zealand in March 2015. By then, early adopters were buying services from overseas.

You could flip that formula and say streaming video arrived just in time to ensure the success of the UFB network. When the network was planned in 2009 officials expected around 20 percent of connected homes would eventually sign up for services.

At the time Netflix officially started in New Zealand, only 10 percent of homes passed by fibre were using the service. By 2018, as the first phase of the network build neared completion, uptake hit 44 percent. This was far beyond the initial target and gave government and fibre companies the confidence to extend the network further into regional New Zealand.

The jump from 10 percent to 44 percent took just three years.

Infrastructure as a catalyst

Netflix’s arrival was not the only clear link between streaming and fibre uptake. There were three points where fibre uptake accelerated. The first was after the launch of local streaming services like Telecom NZ’s (now Spark) Lightbox. The growth line took a sharper upward tick after Netflix arrived. By the time Spark Sport streamed the 2019 Rugby World Cup more than half of homes on the network were using fibre.

In hindsight, the 2019 Rugby World Cup was a pivotal moment in New Zealand telecommunications history. It stress-tested the freshly built network architecture and it forced ISPs and Chorus to rapidly optimise peering arrangements and content delivery networks (CDNs) to handle massive, simultaneous live traffic peaks. This proved its worth the following year as the nation went into lockdown in the early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The golden age of streaming

The years from 2015 to the early 2020s were a golden age of streaming. Telcos like Spark used cheap, ad-free streaming as a carrot to sell fibre broadband. Netflix offered a huge content library at a price well below what families spent at video rental stores. Spark Sport offered a wide range of sporting codes and tournaments for less than NZ$20 a month.

In 2017, IDC Research reported that New Zealanders were among the world's most enthusiastic buyers of streaming services.

Streaming did so well that for a time it looked as if video and music piracy was finally defeated. Why steal when great legitimate content could be had for $15 a month?

Then the economic model changed. Today the streaming landscape is fragmented, expensive and hard for consumers to navigate.

Nothing illustrates what has happened better than the streaming sport sector.

Streaming case study: Sport

Earlier this week the Guardian newspaper reported: Arsenal v PSG got 16.2m illegal stream views in UK after not being free-to-air. This is a significant data point, around one in four views was illegal: copyright piracy is back.

The circumstances are slightly different to the past experience of New Zealand fans who have had little option beyond pay-tv to get their sporting fix. For the last 34 years, the Champions League final has aired in the UK in a free-to-air format.

Yet we are about to see something similar here. TVNZ, which has always been a free-to-air channel, has taken a different strategy with the 2026 World Cup. There will be free-to-air games, but the bulk of the tournament, 82 games, will be behind a $45 paywall.

This is a huge gamble on TVNZ’s part. The Guardian story suggests that when you switch off free-to-air access, consumers don't automatically get out their credit cards: they switch to piracy in droves.

A fragmented pitch

Despite the All Whites taking part in the 2026 World Cup, football is not the obvious sporting code to focus on in a New Zealand context. It is the nation’s fifth or sixth favourite game.

Yet it was football that kicked off streaming sport in New Zealand and has pioneered the market ever since. The first major streaming sports operation here was when Coliseum Sports Media streamed the English Premier League. A year’s subscription cost NZ$150.

This service became the mainstay of Spark Sport before it acquired the 2019 Rugby World Cup rights.

By the time of the 2021-2022 European football season, Spark Sport offered both the English Premier League and the UEFA Competitions: Champions League, Europa League and the newly formed Conference League. Spark also had the rights to the English women's top tier and to domestic New Zealand cricket.

Incredibly good value

The price for this package was $25 a month or $20 a month if you were a Spark mobile or broadband customer. By today’s standards it was incredibly good value.

Comparing the golden age of Spark Sport to the 2026 scene illustrates the point made earlier about modern streaming being fragmented, expensive and consumer-hostile.

Today Sky owns the rights to the English Premier League. While there is a wealth of other sport on Sky, a football fan needs to pay $65 a month to follow their team in the league. DAZN owns the rights to the UEFA competitions, a further $17 a month.

Last year DAZN streamed the World Club Cup competition. To watch the FA Cup you need to subscribe to beIN Sports which costs $15 a month. This also includes Carabao Cup games. Annual subscriptions can work out cheaper in some cases.

Many, but certainly not all, international tournaments show on Sky while TVNZ has previously shown some All Whites games on free-to-air. This year’s World Cup is behind a $45 pay wall.

So in 2026 a football fan has to navigate four streaming services and, if they choose everything, pay well over $1000.

Double dipping

When sports streaming started in New Zealand, the games were shown ad-free. This was also true of services like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. Today that’s not the case, entertainment streamers generally offer lower priced ‘advertising supported’ tiers.

This is not an option with the sports streamers. Services like Sky Sport Now and DAZN are aggressively double-dipping. They manage to extract inflated subscription fees while simultaneously forcing users to watch live, unskippable, highly repetitive localised ads.

Sky Sport Now costs $59.99 a month. That already makes it one of the most expensive streaming apps anywhere in the world and yet you are still force-fed advertising.

DAZN shows the trend

A DAZN subscription may cost less, but its advertising is considerably worse to the point where it becomes an unpleasant user experience.

When DAZN first launched internationally, its marketing slogan described it as "The Netflix of Sports”. The promise was a flat, affordable monthly fee for premium sports without ads or hidden paywalls.

That did not last. Once DAZN locked down exclusive rights to premier properties like the UEFA Champions League or, for Americans, the NFL Game Pass, prices were systematically cranked up. At the same time they introduced unskippable advertising and started hiding the biggest events behind an additional Pay-Per-View (PPV) wall.

Compulsory combat sport promotions

DAZN's primary business is now about selling boxing and MMA. These are expensive pay-per-view channels, where viewers are expected to pay a further $50 or so per programme. The app’s user interface acts as an aggressive, unavoidable billboard for combat sports.

That’s bad enough, but if the streaming halts, viewers have to log in again and sit through the ads once more before rejoining the entertainment. This is jarring for a New Zealander logging on in the wee small hours to see an Arsenal or Chelsea European match.

Another irritant is that streamers know far more about their viewers than traditional broadcast TV, so can more tightly target advertising. There’s a trope in the industry that says viewers are happier to see targeted, relevant ads. However, providers have such a limited ad inventory that New Zealand viewers can be subjected to the same two or three commercials over and over... even in the same break.

DAZN represents the absolute worst impulses of the modern streaming era: it behaves like a free, ad-supported app in terms of its visual clutter and commercial frequency, but charges you like a premium service. Football fans only tolerate this because they have no other legal choice if they want to watch the Champions League.

It’s all about ARPU

Part of what is going on here applies equally to all streaming services. Like telcos, the business metric that matters is ARPU or Average Revenue Per User. When it comes to entertainment streaming, you can buy your way out of the advertising. An additional payment of around $10 a month buys an ad-free entertainment service.

In the streaming world, an ad-supported user is often more valuable to the company than a standard subscriber.

If a streaming service costs $50 a month, the streamer’s revenue from you is $50. But if they charge you $40 a month and make $15 a month by showing you ads, their total revenue from you jumps to $55.

Streaming sport is different

Sport is different from entertainment for three reasons. First, live sport is only live once. Yes, being able to watch on demand is popular especially for New Zealand football fans wanting to see games that kick off at 3am local time and still being able to work the next day. But for big games, live is vital.

Because viewers watch live sport in real-time, they can’t skip the half-time ad break.

Second, there are no substitutes. If your entertainment streaming service doesn’t offer your favourite show, there will be suitable alternatives. That’s not the case with football. A Manchester City fan won’t be satisfied making do with the New York Yankees.

A lucrative demographic

Also, sports fans skew heavily toward the passionate, high-spending demographics that advertisers crave.

By refusing to offer a premium, ad-free tier for sports, streaming companies are keeping that extra "ad value" for themselves.

For Sky to earn the same revenue from a truly ad-free version of Sky Sport where the commercial breaks were replaced with highlight clips, that $60 a month subscription fee would need to be closer to $75 to make up for the lost ad revenue. While exact figures vary, the ad-free price point would inevitably trigger subscriber cancellations.

The squeezed middle

Before we move on, it’s worth pointing out that despite selling one of the world’s most expensive monthly streaming subscriptions, Sky TV is not hugely profitable. The company had a net profit margin of 2.7 percent for the 2025 financial year. There were one-off costs, but the adjusted figure of 5.4 percent is still modest for a business that has a near-monopoly in its core market.

That’s because the company is caught in a pincer. On one side of the pincer it has to buy content from international sports bodies like NZ Rugby, Sanzaar or the Premier League and it is up against competitors with deep pockets.

Among others, Amazon, Apple and Netflix have all been buying sports rights. These artificially inflate the prices charged by sporting bodies. Most of the value in streaming sport ends up with the sports cartels.

The other side of the pincer is that Sky has to claw back its revenue from a population of just over 5 million. If we go back to the example of the Arsenal v PSG Champions League final, UK viewers pay around NZ$10 a month for a subscription to the relevant service. Spreading the costs over a population of 55 million makes that more possible.

General entertainment now fragmented

Entertainment streaming is going through similar changes that are just as aggressive and consumer hostile. The market continues to fragment. Where you might have once bought one or two subscriptions to cover all your entertainment needs, you now either need to pay for multiple subscriptions or flit between services opening new ones and cancelling old ones on a regular basis.

Aside from the extra expense of additional subscriptions and the administrative overhead of managing multiple accounts, it also gives users the job of stitching together entertainment bundles.

The arrival of HBO Max in the New Zealand market parallels what has happened in streaming sport. Global giants like Warner Bros Discovery now operate direct to consumer channels. They have stopped content from local aggregators like Sky with its Neon streaming service.

No more all-in-one

Just as football fans now have to manage and pay for a raft of channels to watch what was once part of an all-in-one service on Spark Sport, viewers seeking streaming entertainment face increased costs and complexity.

Data from companies like Roy Morgan show that while Netflix remains the favourite of New Zealand households with around 2.2 million regular viewers, the rest of the market has commoditised. It has all been designed to squeeze more and more ARPU from an exhausted base of consumers.

International loss-leader strategy

Big tech firms have distorted sports markets overseas. Netflix has the rights to some of America’s NFL games and Apple has Major League Soccer rights. They treat sport as a loss leader for other properties. Apple gets to sell more iPhones and drive up its subscription business, a tail that is starting to wag the dog. Amazon uses sport a lure for its Prime shipping business. In both cases these are ecosystem plays.

While this breaks the traditional market, local providers like Sky TV or TVNZ cannot compete on those terms because video content is their entire business, not a strategy to grow other parallel corporate operations.

We have been here before. In the mid-2010s, telecommunications companies faced the threat of commoditisation. This was true around the world, but the Telecom NZ demerger that gave us Chorus and Spark made this particularly acute in New Zealand. Fibre broadband became a commodity, every telco sold the same product. To compete on price, Spark would need to compromise its profit margins.

Spark looked at its main rival Vodafone (now One NZ), which was getting ever closer to Sky TV. At one time the two attempted a merger. Vodafone had its own TV product and offered bundled packages with Sky. This gave the company a point of differentiation in what was becoming a commodity market.

Sport could give Spark a better edge, sports enthusiasts are more of a premium market than general TV viewers. It realised it could use the Rugby World Cup and English Premier League rights as an aggressive customer-acquisition tool. If you want to watch Rugby or football for free, all you had to do was switch your fibre or mobile plan to Spark. It was a loss leader that broke Spark out of the commodity trap.

In Australia, Optus outbid Fox Sports for the English Premier League rights. They explicitly forced customers to sign up for Optus broadband or mobile contracts to access the games. Telstra did the same with AFL and NRL streaming rights.

Geographic scale has its limits

This strategy looked good until American tech giants with deeper pockets faced similar commoditisation traps. The price of sports rights ramped up faster than any growth in broadband or mobile subscriptions could sustain. This reached the point where the cost of those rights threatened the very profits the telcos had been protecting with their forays in streaming sport.

Digital is all about scale. New Zealand’s population of five million can’t scale enough to justify the cost of sports rights. Even Australia’s 26 million is not big enough. Apple, Amazon and Netflix have billions of potential customers in their sights.

That model has since been turned on its head. In the golden age of streaming telcos like Spark, Telstra and British Telecom gave away streaming to sell premium fibre or mobile subscriptions. The exact same playbook is now being used by tech giants. While there is no reason to suspect they will be more successful, their activity will change the market.

Today, that has reversed, Sky TV now sells broadband to its customer base. This is an attempt to capture more margin and, once again, raise ARPU across the business. With content margins being squeezed by overseas market changes, Sky can recover ARPU by selling the connection.

It all goes round in circles

The telecommunications sector spent the last decade using the unbundled allure of cheap, ad-free streaming to justify and accelerate New Zealand’s world-class UFB deployment. The network succeeded beyond the wildest projections of its initial planners, creating a national utility that quite literally kept the economic wheels turning during global lockdowns.

But the media ecosystem that flourished across that fibre infrastructure has grown into an increasingly fragmented, difficult to navigate and expensive landscape.

When subscription fees skyrocket, platforms double-dip by inserting unskippable ads into premium tiers, and content is aggressively siloed into independent corporate vaults, consumers do not infinitely divide their wallets. They reach a hard financial limit.

The massive spike in worldwide digital piracy, exemplified by the millions who turned to illicit feeds for the Champions League Final, may be a consumer response to a deeply broken user experience.

By pushing their growth strategies and chasing higher ARPU past the point of friction, media giants have inadvertently built a thriving parallel market for illegal IPTV services that run seamlessly across fibre networks like the one New Zealand built.

Liberation

The digital streaming revolution promised liberation from the bloated, expensive, one-size-fits-all pay-TV legacy. A decade later, faced with a fragmented array of services that collectively cost far more than cable ever did while serving the exact same commercial interruptions, consumers are exhausted.

One possible development is for the fragmented parts to reconsolidate. For aggregators to emerge. What an irony we face. It is possible that after ten to 15 years of turmoil, we’ll end up with a video media landscape that closely resembles the model we had before any fibre was laid.

The difference is that the moving images on our screens that once beamed through the airwaves will be delivered over fibre and fixed wireless broadband technologies by internet protocol.

Last week SpaceX launched what it hopes will be the largest stock market listing in history. The company aims to raise US$75 billion to fund its rocket and space travel development programme. See this separate analysis of what this means for New Zealand's telecommunications sector.

Golden Bay resilience group warns telecoms gap remains

A Golden Bay resilience group says the government has confirmed a major gap remains in emergency communications for remote communities dependent on vulnerable telecoms infrastructure.

Project Strim spokesperson Shelley Grell says residents in Mohua-Golden Bay are exposed because the region relies on a single fibre link over Tākaka Hill. When that link fails, mobile services, internet access, landlines, Eftpos and connected medical alarms can all go down at once.

In a recent letter to the group, communications minister Paul Goldsmith says the government does not have regulatory powers to compel telecommunications companies to invest in regional backhaul resilience.

The minister also acknowledges satellite-to-mobile services do not yet support 111 emergency calling, although he says evolving satellite technology “may” improve this in future.

Beyond emergency calling

Grell says the issue is broader than emergency calling.

“Communities also need to contact family, check on neighbours, receive emergency information, organise welfare support and communicate with Civil Defence,” she says.

Golden Bay has experienced a series of major outages in recent years after fibre connections over Tākaka Hill were severed during storms and floods.

Grell told The Download Weekly that residents often underestimate the seriousness of prolonged communications failures.

“When the internet’s out, the power is out and the roads are closed, it is absolutely destabilising and frightening,” she says.

Preparation for outages

Project Strim says households should prepare with backup power, radios, cash and emergency plans, but argues household preparedness is not a substitute for resilient regional infrastructure.

The group is now investigating practical local measures including public emergency WiFi hubs, backup power planning and improved community coordination during outages.

The issue follows wider industry debate about rural connectivity resilience after Cyclone Gabrielle exposed weaknesses in New Zealand’s regional telecommunications networks.

Background reading:

Rural telecommunications in New Zealand explained

New Zealand is both sparsely populated and highly urbanised which presents unique logistic and economic hurdles for building ground-based telecommunications infrastructure.

Bill BennettBill Bennett

Chorus responds on Fibre IM Review

Following up on the May 1 report on the Fibre IM Review, Chorus has responded to Spark’s criticisms in a cross-submission.

The Commerce Commission is reviewing the rules that govern how Chorus can invest in and charge for its fibre network.

Chorus rejects Spark's call to delay network expansion rules. It argues that separating incremental upgrades from existing network technologies is impractical. The fibre company argues that measuring what consumers are willing to pay remains the most transparent investment test.

Also in its response, Chorus defended treating service failure penalties as an ordinary "cost of doing business" that belongs in regulated pricing. he company rejects Spark's argument that this weakens performance incentives. Chorus says it already faces strong discipline from market competition and strict government quality standards.

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In other news...

• Warnings about dangers of Starlink rural broadband monopoly — RNZ.
  Rural ISPs warn against over-reliance on a single provider.
• Infratil boosts earnings — NZ Herald (paywall)
  One New Zealand is the group profit generator.
• 6G: Next generation wireless nobody's ready to pay for — The Register
  The technology will be ready, but the business case and markets will not.

One NZ research shows AI trust gap

Research commissioned by One New Zealand found AI is becoming mainstream with three quarters of New Zealanders used AI tools or services in the last year.

Yet that familiarity is making us sceptical. Researchers found fewer than two in five believe AI will deliver what the research terms 'better outcomes for society'. A further 70 percent of AI users reported experiencing problems in the past year.

The problems include AI systems being unable to understand requests or context and difficulty getting past the AI to a human. Respondents also encountered incorrect information.

In a response to these shortcomings, One NZ says it has opened an AI trust hub on its website giving customers information about where and when AI is being used.

Tait Communications wins at Hi-Tech Awards

Christchurch-based radio communications specialist Tait Communications was named as the PwC Hi-Tech Company of the Year at the Hi-Tech Awards. The award judges said: “Tait is coming off a phenomenal year, passing the half billion dollar revenue mark.”

Reanz adds international back-up link

Academic and research network provider Reanz (Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand) has added a connection to the Tasman Global Access cable from Hamilton. The move gives customers a physically separate route to the rest of the world that reduces the network’s reliance on a single landing point.

Reanz worked with One NZ’s wholesale fibre business EonFibre to build the link. Reanz says there is dedicated capacity on the TGA cable, supporting consistent performance with room to grow.

This time last year: ComCom warns 2degrees

The May 30 2025 newsletter reported onthe Commerce Commission warning to 2degrees that its May 2023 “No Giant Wait” advertising campaign may have breached the Fair Trading Act. The advertising claimed the telco would be able to offer customers “satellite coverage launching this year, not next”. The newsletter also covered Tait Communications’s bid to buy Vital Limited. The deal concluded in September 2025.

Five years ago Orcon began offering a business class fibre broadband service where customers paid a premium to get priority support and site visits.

Download Weekly is a New Zealand telecommunications industry newsletter written by Bill Bennett. You are welcome to pass it on to your friends and colleagues. While the newsletter is free, reader support helps enormously. If you’re reading this for work, donations are tax-free. A banner at the top of the page will take you to the support site.

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Last week SpaceX launched what it hopes will be the largest stock market listing in history. The company aims to raise US$75 billion to fund its ambitious rocket and space travel development programme.

Of more direct interest to New Zealand’s telecommunications sector, SpaceX also plans to expand Starlink, its low earth orbit satellite network.

The IPO prospectus confirms that SpaceX no longer sees itself mainly as a launch company. It is pitching to potential investors in three areas: AI infrastructure, connectivity and space services.

While all will affect New Zealand, Starlink's low earth orbit satellite connectivity matters most.

Dominating the conversation

Starlink already dominates connectivity conversations in rural New Zealand. Our rural geography, dispersed population and patchy mobile coverage create a fertile market for a broadband service that can reach almost anywhere.

By some measures New Zealanders are the most enthusiastic buyers of Starlink services. The Commerce Commission has previously reported that New Zealand has the highest number of satellite connections per capita in the OECD. Almost all of those connections are believed to be Starlink.

Assuming the IPO gives SpaceX greater access to capital, we can expect more satellite launches, capacity upgrades and additional direct-to-device services.

This has implications for rural broadband providers.

The land grab

Wombat Net managing director Alex Stewart runs a small regional ISP north of Wellington. He noticed a Starlink marketing push that started well ahead of the IPO.

He says: “In January, Starlink offered free installs. There have also been three nationwide mail drops over the past couple of months. These loosely align with what was called a ‘land grab’ ahead of the IPO.”

Starlink’s two-pronged land grab aims to boost customer numbers for the IPO while winning business before Amazon Leo enters the market in late 2026.

Aggressive pricing

There have been a series of aggressive price cuts. At the time of writing, Starlink’s website highlights an introductory offer of NZ$59 for a 100 Mbps plan. That’s a little misleading, $59 is only for four months then the price rises to $85.

At first read, Starlink’s New Zealand pricing appears to be confusing and constantly changing. The price of a standard residential plan varies from month to month: what the company now calls Residential Max is currently $170 but it has fluctuated.

Behind Residential Max are lower-cost, slower tiers, in the past Starlink described them as ‘deprioritised’. Prices range between $80 and $100 a month, although again they are not stable.

For businesses and more demanding residential users there are ‘priority’ tiers with higher bandwidth. These come with data caps. A 2TB plan costs $890 a month.

It’s worth pointing out that in connectivity terms, that plan delivers more or less what urban New Zealanders on the fibre network can buy for under $100; they will get lower latency and greater reliability.

Looking more like a telco

What is becoming clearer is that Starlink is no longer operating like a premium satellite broadband service. The pricing structure, discounts and tiering suggest the company is optimising for rapid market share rather than stable retail margins.

That shifts it closer to a mainstream telecom operator than an alternative niche option.

For smaller rural wireless ISPs, that already creates a difficult dynamic. Many rely on a narrow base of customers spread across high-cost infrastructure. Even modest churn to Starlink can undermine the economics of maintaining towers, backhaul and local support.

Over time, that can accelerate consolidation or withdrawal from marginal areas.

In its 2024 monitoring report, the Commerce Commission says rural wireless internet service providers “are losing ground to satellite competitors”.

Profound impact on regional providers

As Wombat Net’s Stewart points out, the effect on smaller wireless ISPs and rural infrastructure economics is profound. If Starlink pulls enough customers away from fixed wireless operators, local networks will no longer generate enough revenue to maintain towers and backhaul links. They will become uneconomic.

The bigger carriers, Spark, One NZ and 2degrees, are better placed because they control spectrum and have scale. But they are not insulated. If Starlink continues to move down-market and improves latency and device integration, it will increasingly sit alongside mobile networks rather than simply feeding off their gaps.

There is no reason to suspect that Starlink will stop its expansion after driving local service providers out of the market.

There is evidence that rural fixed wireless broadband from the mobile network operators is losing ground to Starlink. For now that picture is unclear because fixed wireless overall is still growing in New Zealand.

Starlink can also use direct-to-device to compete directly against mobile carriers, potentially bundling broadband and mobile services. That’s likely to start in regions with sparse mobile coverage.

Starlink’s model challenges the economics of all telcos operating in rural areas.

Spectrum remains important

New Zealand carriers have the advantage of owning key spectrum. Even that is likely to be challenged if the IPO leaves Starlink with deep enough pockets. The company is already pushing for direct spectrum allocations in Australia. It will undoubtedly be considering a similar move in New Zealand.

Scaling direct-to-device services would allow SpaceX to transition from complementing mobile networks to competing directly with them. If local carriers retreat from offering rural services, it’s only a matter of time before the competition moves to urban markets.

For now, this remains a transitional phase. It is not yet a settled outcome. The IPO narrative is accelerating investment and competition, but the long-term shape of the market, whether satellite remains a backup service or replaces traditional networks entirely, is still unclear, though change is inevitable.

In this edition:

• National Infrastructure Funding and Financing money for cell site resilience
• Spark and Ericsson build private 5G network
• One NZ runs second hand phone pilot
• New Zealand top user of satellite direct-to-device

Government funds Spark tower battery upgrades

National Infrastructure Funding and Financing (NIFF) has awarded Spark a contract to upgrade battery back-up capacity at 295 cell towers. The upgrades mean towers will have 24 hours of battery back-up in the event of a power outage.

Spark is working with Connexa, which acquired the telco’s mobile tower network in 2022. Connexa also owns the towers formerly owned by 2degrees.

The upgrades will start later in 2026 and are expected to be completed by June 2027.

Connexa, Spark and the government are co-funding the increased battery capacity. Of the $6.4 million allocated by the government to this fund, $4 million has been contracted to support the upgrades for the 295 sites.

Access during long outages

Mike Paranihi, Spark’s general manager of network and operations, says: “Extending battery back-up will enable over a million Spark customers to have access to mobile data, text and calls during prolonged outages.”

He says in a power disruption people living at as many as 1.7 million addresses will be able to call 111 regardless of their telco provider.

National Infrastructure Funding and Financing (NIFF) is a government agency that connects private capital investments to public infrastructure projects. NIFF traces its origins back to Crown Fibre Holdings, which oversaw the UFB rollout before becoming Crown Infrastructure Partners and, in 2024, NIFF

The increased battery capacity is co-funded by Connexa, Spark and the government. Of the $6.4 million allocated by the government to this fund, $4 million has been contracted to support the upgrades for the 295 sites.

Background:

Upgrades strengthen resilience - power still weak spot

Would the telecommunications sector fare better if there was another extreme weather event like Cyclone Gabrielle? The Download Weekly put the questions to TCF CEO Paul Brislen.

Bill BennettBill Bennett

Port Nelson replaces WiFi with private 5G

Port Nelson replaced its unreliable warehouse WiFi with a private 5G network built by Spark and Ericsson. The new network improves pallet scanning, improvements to productivity and safety. It also opens the door for future automation.

Spark’s 5G private network covers around 30,000 square metres across three warehouses in Nelson and Blenheim and uses Ericsson Private 5G. There is a core at Port Nelson that connects to small cell radios.

That’s important because the Port’s complex design and the high‑density block‑stacking storage used in the warehouses meant there were persistent dead spots in the WiFi network that was previously in use. Staff were forced to change operating processes to maintain connectivity.

The Port uses Ericsson Cradlepoint ruggedised R1900 routers for forklift connectivity and tracking. These have dual-SIM capability, which lets them switch between Spark’s public and private 5G networks when forklifts move outside the private 5G coverage areas.

Connectivity as a constraint

Reagan Pattison, Port Nelson’s general manager business transformation, says connectivity was becoming an operational constraint. “No matter how much we tried to saturate our warehouses with WiFi, we couldn’t get consistent performance. That impacted productivity, created frustration for our operators, and limited our ability to modernise how we work.”

In contrast, private 5G offers predictable performance and pervasive coverage. It means staff can scan pallets in real time without interruption. It also gives improved visibility into performance so issues can be identified and fixed.

There’s push-to-talk communications which helps with health and safety. Location-based alerts can warn people about vehicle movements.

In a statement, Spark says the private 5G network could support future applications such as real‑time asset tracking, predictive maintenance, enhanced CCTV cameras, AI‑enabled vision and automation.

One NZ to sell refurbished phones

One New Zealand is now running a pilot programme selling refurbished mobile phones. The phones have been tested, cleaned and restored to what One calls excellent condition. This means no cracks, dents or heavy wear and at least 80 percent battery health.

The phones are sold with a 24-month warranty and at a discount to new price giving consumers a lower cost route to upgrading their handsets.

While the cost savings are important, One NZ’s focus is more on the sustainability aspects of refurbishing previously used hardware.

The company says a refurbished phone can cut emissions by up to 49 percent when compared to buying a new phone. That’s about 34 kg of CO₂e for each phone.

Nicky Preston, One NZ’s head of sustainability and corporate affairs says: “Keeping devices in play for longer is a practical way to avoid emissions and save people money at the same time.”

At the time of writing One has iPhone 12, 13, 14 Pro and 15 Pro models. The telco says it expects to add more models as the programme expands.

One NZ has a phone trade-in programme which lets customers use the value of their existing phone towards the cost of a new one.

Preston says One NZ is already seeing strong demand from customers wanting to trade-in old phones. “Selling refurbished phones is the next step in our circularity journey, making it easier for those devices to find a second life, and for more people to access high-quality phones at a lower price.”

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In other news...

• Fibre, fixed wireless, satellites and rural connectivity — NZ Tech Podcast
  Hear me on the NZ Tech Podcast with Paul Spain talking about rural connectivity and other topics.
• What screen time does to children’s brains — NZ Herald (paywall)
  Results from Auckland University study show harm is real.
• SpaceX files for IPO — BBC
  Business valued at US$1.25 trillion.

New Zealand leads direct-to-device league table

Speedtest data suggests New Zealand is the world’s most enthusiastic user of satellite direct-to-device or D2D services. D2D is the technology that allows ordinary mobile phones to connect to satellite networks. For now, the services only support messaging and limited data applications.

The table compares the proportion of all Speedtest users using D2D services, which may not be an accurate measure of usage, but in the absence of other data is a useful proxy. The proportion of New Zealanders connecting through D2D is 1.41 percent. Chile is in second place with 1.26 percent, while Australia is 1.07 percent.

One NZ wins cloud innovation award

Red Hat named One New Zealand as a winner in its annual innovation awards. The prize is for One NZ’s work to modernise its telecommunications cloud infrastructure. This brings together a series of formerly fragmented systems in a single cloud. One NZ says it can reduce costs and bring new services to market faster..

This time last year: Chorus boosts business fibre

Chorus refreshed its business fibre portfolio with a range of upgrades including a 1 Gbps symmetrical plan. Also in the edition are OECD stats showing New Zealand is third in the world for fixed wireless broadband adoption.

Five years ago 2degrees was preparing for an IPO 2degrees reported service revenue of $545 million for the 2020 financial year as parent company, Toronto-listed Trilogy International said it was preparing to list 2degrees.

Ten years ago the RCG completed the first stage of its rural network build ahead of deadline delivering wireless broadband to 300,000 homes.

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A report commissioned by the mobile carriers and their tower partners challenges the idea that fibre should be the first choice for rural connectivity.

Connecting Rural New Zealand was written by UK-based Flint Global. It was commissioned by Spark, One NZ, 2degrees, Fortysouth and Connexa, in effect the entire mobile sector. These companies also sell fixed wireless broadband.

The mobile sector wants any initiative to improve rural broadband to be based on outcomes, not the delivery technology or, in their words: “not infrastructure ideology”.

They say rural users care more about what they get than how they get it.

Public funding

The report also makes a case for any public money spent on rural broadband to be used to target genuine coverage gaps. It wants to see competitive funding and, while it acknowledges there is a role for fibre, it says the government should “avoid subsidising fibre where wireless or satellite can deliver similar outcomes faster and cheaper”.

2degrees CEO Mark Callander sums up the position: “Fixed wireless, mobile and satellite services are quickly developing and improving. A technology-neutral approach means rural communities can benefit from world-class connectivity sooner, while fibre can still be prioritised where the case for it is strongest.”

It adds up to a sophisticated sales pitch on behalf of the mobile sector in the light of 2025’s announcement by Te Waihanga, the Infrastructure Commission, that Chorus’ plan to extend its fibre network is on the Infrastructure Priorities Programme.

The pitch is less about fibre or fixed wireless, more about fibre and fixed wireless.

There is a nod in the report to the regional wireless internet service providers, which it calls “non-cellular FWA (fixed wireless access) networks” and “Wisps”. It notes that 69 percent of households without fibre are already within the coverage area of at least one non-cellular fixed wireless network.

The report also notes that satellite connections in rural New Zealand grew 60 percent in a year and says satellite could overtake copper in rural areas soon.

Analysis: Small regional providers also have a role

There’s no question fibre remains the best broadband technology. The report accepts it is the gold standard. Yet we know it is not the practical option for every rural home or business.

The mobile sector says it wants to see a technology-neutral approach. Given that the companies who commissioned the report are all national mobile or infrastructure operators, it’s clear they want a share of any government funding for rural connectivity to head their way. That’s understandable.

There is much in the report about mobile fixed wireless, fibre and LEO satellite services, but discussion of the role smaller regional providers could play in future rural connectivity programmes is glossed over.

Small regional providers don’t have budgets to pay for fancy London analyst reports and lobbyists in Wellington, but they have been successfully serving local communities for years now. Many of the hardest-to-reach locations are connected by Wisps, not mobile carriers or fibre companies. They do it on the smell of an oily rag.

As the mobile sector companies say in the report: “Rural users care more about what they get than how they get it.” It’s a philosophy that Wisps understood and pioneered.

When the report argues for “competitive allocation” and “technology-neutral” funding, it could be making a case for those regional service providers.

Offshore telcos face NZ regulation

The Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee has recommended passing the Telecommunications and Other Matters Amendment Bill, extending New Zealand’s regulatory reach to offshore providers serving local customers.

The bill aims to ensure all providers serving New Zealand consumers are covered by local law, regardless of where they or their infrastructure are based.

That would bring overseas operators into rules covering industry levies, consumer protections, emergency calling and access services.

The bill also clarifies that, under the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Act, (TICSA), network operators and service providers can be based either in New Zealand or overseas.

Updated wording says the law applies to overseas providers if they offer services to end-users in New Zealand, even when infrastructure is partly or wholly offshore.

New enforcement powers

The legislation would also create a new enforcement regime. Radio and spectrum licences could be revoked, suspended or restricted where existing enforcement options are impractical.

The new powers would sit in a proposed Part 7A of the Radiocommunications Act. They would allow the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment secretary to revoke licences or restrict spectrum access for serious breaches of either the Telecommunications Act or TICSA.

The committee narrowed some of the original extra-territorial powers. It recommended limiting offshore enforcement linked to regulations to emergency calling requirements only.

It also added safeguards, including written notice and an opportunity for providers to respond before penalties are imposed.

New Zealand cables “Iceland Unplugged”

Assistant Transport Minister James Meager requested a progress report on 10 "no-cost, low-effort" initiatives to address vulnerabilities in New Zealand's undersea internet and power cables from the Ministry of Transport.

Part of the status update included analysis of an "Iceland Unplugged" simulation where four submarine cables were cut. It found that New Zealand's existing five international cables provide enough redundancy so that losing one would not be felt by the public.

The report estimates that a new submarine cable from here to the US costs around $1 billion. This underlines why the government is focusing on low-cost regulatory protections rather than building a new connection.

You can read the public version of the document here, however large parts have been blocked out, mainly the sections on "state-sponsored threats" and "grey zone tactics”. Despite this, it says the most common physical risks remain fishing gear and anchors.

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In other news...

• Netflix launching cheaper ad-supported plan in NZ — NZ Herald
  Ad plans come with a few catches.
• The tech we build matters — The Post
  Government has a key role

Telecom among the least competitive industries

The Commerce Commission names telecoms as one of the least competitive industries in its first State of Competition report published this week. The report is a snapshot of how competition is working across the economy.

It says: “Governments have opted to regulate sectors with limited or no competition to improve market outcomes, including...telecommunications...”.

The report notes the sector has been subject to significant change over the past two decades, including the structural separation of Telecom and the entry of 2degrees. It says the Commerce Commission continues to take an active role in promoting competition and monitoring the sector.

Part of the report’s analysis looks at industries that are upstream, which means their services are inputs for other industries, or downstream. Low competition in upstream industries can have a knock-on effect across the economy. Telecoms is upstream, which makes it economically significant.

TCF updates disclosure code

The New Zealand Telecommunications Forum has updated the Product Disclosure Code, previously known as the Broadband Product Disclosure Code.

This is a set of guidelines that help consumers compare competing product offers. It sets out minimum obligations for information service providers to include in plan descriptions. This includes setting out the words and terminology that have to be used.

For now the code covers broadband products, but future updates will include comparisons of mobile plans.

This time last year

The Commerce Commission review of its Fibre Regulations Framework got underway and received initial submissions from Chorus and 2degrees expressing widely different views on the next set of rules.

Five years ago in Download Weekly

UK-based research company Opensignal published a report saying the gap between New Zealand’s rural and urban mobile experiences was closing. It went on to warn that the arrival of 5G mobile could muddy that picture.

Ten years ago Spark and Huawei switched on New Zealand’s first 4.5G mobile site in central Christchurch. The two demonstrated gigabit download speeds.

What data sovereignty means for New Zealand

What data sovereignty means for New Zealand organisations, why the Cloud Act matters and why ‘local cloud’ does not guarantee legal protection.

Bill BennettBill Bennett

Download Weekly is a New Zealand telecommunications industry newsletter. You are welcome to pass it on to your friends and colleagues. While the newsletter is free, reader support helps enormously. If you’re reading this for work, donations are tax-free. A banner at the top of the page will take you to the support site.

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When an organisation stores its data with an overseas cloud provider, the laws of the country where that data sits apply in addition to New Zealand law.

The data owner remains responsible for making sure the data is handled in a way that complies with all applicable laws, including New Zealand's own privacy legislation. It is not the cloud provider’s responsibility.

This leaves data owners with a practical problem. A government or court in the host country can compel a cloud provider to hand over data, often without notifying the data owner. Sometimes under legal orders that may not require judicial warrants in the New Zealand sense

US law can apply to data kept in New Zealand

US law extends this further. Under America’s Cloud Act, that nation’s authorities can demand access to data held by US-owned companies even when that data is physically stored in another country.

It could mean your private information is readily available to US government agencies.

Which is why data sovereignty is so important. It is the principle that data should remain subject to the laws of the country where it was created or where the people it concerns are based: not wherever a cloud provider happens to store it.

In the past, people believed the best way to ensure data remains private and protected was for it to never leave this country, but in today’s world of cloud computing, international data centres and AI scraping, that’s increasingly difficult.

Local cloud

You may hear service providers talk about ‘local cloud’. The implication is that data stays in New Zealand and any services are operated here. The service providers argue this reduces exposure to offshore risk and aligns with local privacy expectations.

While this can be the case, if the provider is a foreign company, then it may still be subject to overseas law.

The term ‘local cloud’ muddies the waters. The key distinction is not where data lives. Nor is about where services are billed or even if the service provider is local when it resells from a hyperscaler.

What matters is which country’s courts can compel access and which country’s regulator has authority over processing. You need to consider what happens if there is a cross-border legal request. Also, it matters who controls encryption keys and administrative access.

In New Zealand, data sovereignty is not defined by a single rule or policy. It emerges from the interaction of three overlapping layers. They do not always point in the same direction.

Privacy Act 2020

New Zealand’s Privacy Act 2020 is central. It governs how personal information must be managed in New Zealand. It requires organisations to protect personal data and to limit its disclosure overseas. It also sets expectations for transparency, purpose and security. In serious cases, the Act mandates breach reporting.

There’s nothing in the Act that prevents data from being processed overseas and the Adt neither removes exposure to foreign legal systems nor asserts exclusive New Zealand jurisdiction over data once it leaves organisational control.

Foreign laws and operational control

The second layer comes from foreign laws with extraterritorial reach, most notably the US Cloud Act.

Data stored in New Zealand can still fall within overseas legal jurisdiction if the service provider is headquartered elsewhere or subject to another country’s laws.

Operational control

The third layer is less about law and more about operational control and strategic dependence.

This includes who owns the infrastructure, who operates the cloud platform, where management decisions are made and whether New Zealand organisations can meaningfully control access to their own data and systems.

Hyperscalers and local regions

A foreign cloud provider can build a local data centre region in New Zealand. Local customers get the benefit of lower latency. Providers argue that it improves resilience. Yet it does not automatically create sovereign control. The infrastructure may sit in Auckland, yet ownership, software control, support operations and legal accountability remain offshore.

There’s a clear tension here. Hyperscalers can offer lower costs and greater capability, but that can come at the cost of accountability and alignment with New Zealand interests. There are also national security questions. What happens during geopolitical conflicts? Will we always be able to access that data?

Expensive litigation

If a dispute arises over data handled by an overseas provider, any legal action is likely to take place in a foreign court under unfamiliar rules.

For a New Zealand organisation, that means not just legal fees but the cost of navigating an foreign system, but potentially losing any savings that motivated the offshore decision in the first place.

Māori data sovereignty

There’s a unique New Zealand Aotearoa aspect to data sovereignty: Māori data sovereignty. This holds that data about Māori people, communities and whenua should be subject to Māori governance — not simply New Zealand law in general.

The principle draws on tino rangatiratanga, the right of self-determination affirmed in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Te Mana Raraunga, the Māori Data Sovereignty Network, has been central to developing this framework.

The concern extends beyond offshore jurisdiction: even data held within New Zealand may not be under Māori control if it sits with a government agency or commercial provider without appropriate governance arrangements.

It’s not about the technology

Data sovereignty is often viewed as a technical problem with a technical solution. In reality it is a question of accountability: who has the right to access information, under what rules and in whose interests.

For New Zealand organisations, the answer increasingly depends less on where data is stored and more on whose law governs it, who controls the infrastructure and whether those arrangements can be trusted to hold when they are tested.

This page is part of a series of background briefings on New Zealand’s telecommunications industry:

• Fibre networks in New Zealand
• Mobile networks in New Zealand
• Satellite communications in New Zealand
• Rural telecommunications in New Zealand

In this edition

• PSTN interconnection to be investigated
• Ventia looks to datacentre business
• One NZ adds 29 sites

ComCom investigates PSTN interconnection

The Commerce Commission has confirmed it will investigate deregulating PSTN interconnection. This is the service guaranteeing customers on one provider’s fixed phone service can call customers on another provider’s network.

In its final decision, the Commerce Commission ruled that it sees VoIP-based fixed voice services as part of PSTN Interconnection.

This means the PSTN interconnection is no longer merely a regulatory tidy-up of rules for an era that is about to end.

The final decision, released on May 6, clears the way for a formal investigation. The Commission now has to deliver a recommendation to the communications minister within 240 working days.

Fixed line connections declining at pace

It says there are reasonable grounds to question whether continued regulation remains necessary. It notes a sustained decline in fixed-line usage, widespread availability of mobile and cloud alternatives.

New Zealand’s legacy copper network continues to shrink at a fast pace. Earlier this year Chorus said copper connections fell from 63,000 to 53,000 in the latest quarter alone.

The Commission also found no evidence of anti-competitive conduct in the wholesale market.

Aussie Broadband makes the opposing case

In March, Aussie Broadband wrote a submission on behalf of its Symbio subsidiary opposing deregulation. It was the sole dissenting submission.

Symbio supplies voice interconnection and numbering services to many retail providers and has an interest in preserving regulated access arrangements.

The Commerce Commission dismissed Aussie Broadband’s arguments saying they are either unsupported by market evidence or outside the scope of the competition test.

Australia still regulates voice interconnection services, including both fixed and mobile termination.

VoIP interpretation

The final decision includes the interpretation that PSTN Interconnection includes VoIP-based fixed voice services. The VoIP question was left open earlier.

By ruling that VoIP falls within the regulated service, the Commission ensures the investigation covers fixed voice as it actually exists today, not just the legacy copper infrastructure that is visibly dying.

Deregulation would shift fixed voice interconnection from regulated terms to commercial negotiation.

No longer an alternative

This interpretation also means VoIP can no longer be considered as a competing alternative. PSTN’s remaining alternatives become mobile and over the top services.

Which leads to the question of whether these two technologies add up to enough competition to justify deregulation.

Spark spent years moving customers from legacy copper PSTN to VoIP. If VoIP interconnection is within scope and the investigation recommends deregulation, that removes the regulatory backstop from fixed voice interconnection across the board.

Deregulation, while not a given, looks probable. If that happens, fixed voice interconnection would move from sector-specific regulation to ordinary commercial arrangements for the first time in decades.

Ventia resets strategy around digital infrastructure

Telecommunications is no longer the centre of Ventia’s growth strategy was the key message in an investor presentation the company gave earlier this week.

Instead Ventia plans to pivot towards a broader “digital infrastructure” market built around data centres, power and critical facilities.

While telecommunications remains “the foundation”, Ventia’s leadership sees digital infrastructure as its future “growth engine”.

Ventia has a deep and long-running relationship in New Zealand with Chorus. While the fibre company’s name may appear on vans, often the people inside are employed by Ventia. It played a major role in the UFB and subsequent network deployments.

Here the company works across fibre, wireless and network operations and maintenance services. It claims to be the largest telecommunications infrastructure services provider in Australia and New Zealand.

Bigger opportunity elsewhere

Despite this, the presentation makes clear the company sees the bigger opportunity elsewhere.

Ventia says the addressable market for datacentre services across Australia and New Zealand could grow from A$2.6 billion in 2025 to A$5.9 billion by 2030, driven by AI workloads, cloud expansion and demand for sovereign infrastructure.

The company is positioning itself as more than a network contractor. It highlights capabilities spanning fibre construction, high-voltage power systems, datacentre fit-outs and ongoing operations and maintenance services.

That matters for New Zealand because local datacentre projects increasingly face the same pressures seen in Australia: securing enough electricity supply, connecting to transmission networks and meeting government and enterprise requirements around data sovereignty.

Power demand rises with data

Ventia also links future growth to energy infrastructure, saying demand for high-voltage grid connections is rising alongside data centre development.

The presentation suggests infrastructure contractors increasingly see telecommunications as one layer in a wider digital economy build-out rather than a standalone industry.

One NZ builds 29 sites, lifts 5G coverage

One New Zealand says it built 29 new sites between January and March 2026. The company’s technology team upgraded a further 57 sites expanding its 5G network to an additional 50 locations.

In a parallel development, the carrier says visitors to the One New Zealand Stadium in Christchurch downloaded 3.4 TB of data over three match days.

In other news...

• Amazon takes a $45m write down on its unbuilt Auckland datacentre — NZ Herald (paywall).
  Revenues doubled during the year.
• Humanoid robots expected on New Zealand farms in a decade — Farmers Weekly
  Prediction includes robots in milking sheds.
• Questioning New Zealand’s datacentre building boom — The Conversation
  Can we count them as wins for our economy?

Satellite direct-to-device market up 25 percent

Ookla reports that the direct-to-device satellite market grew 25 percent between July 2025 and March 2026. It’s still a niche, in most countries less than one percent of people use the services.

The US accounts for almost half (46 percent) of activity as the technology allows standard phones to bypass traditional cell towers in remote regions. Current services are limited to text, but voice and broadband capabilities are expected as networks expand.

According to Ookla, Starlink dominates the sector but faces competition from AST SpaceMobile and Globalstar which was acquired last month by Amazon.

This time last year

Chorus and 2degrees laid out widely opposing views in their submissions for the Commerce Commission’s review of its Fibre Regulations Framework

Five years ago in Download Weekly

A report by UK-based Opensignal found a closing gap between rural and urban mobile experience. While there are still huge differences the amount of time rural mobile users spent on 4G networks increased faster than in urban areas.

Ten years ago

We reported on the work carried out by Spark and Huawei to upgrade a central Christchurch site to 4.5G which managed to deliver gigabit mobile speeds.

Download Weekly is a New Zealand telecommunications industry newsletter. You are welcome to pass it on to your friends and colleagues. While the newsletter is free, reader support helps enormously. If you’re reading this for work, donations are tax-free. There's a banner at the top of the page that will take you to the support site.

Have your say. Sign up as a subscriber, it is free, to comment on any of the stories on this site. We don’t collect any personal data other than an email address.

Telecommunications networks are crucial infrastructure. They carry essential services and underpin the economy.

If networks fail, business and daily life can quickly stall. New Zealand also depends on digital services that rely on those networks. Protecting infrastructure and the data moving across it matters.

It’s not just internal networks. The country connects to the world through a small number of submarine cables.

Where the threats come from

Cyber threats come from both criminals and states.

Criminal gangs operate worldwide. They target networks, service providers and supply chains, often using ransomware or data theft.

States use cyber operations as part of wider strategy. Attacks can support political pressure, economic goals or military planning. They may target infrastructure such as networks and submarine cables, as well as the systems that support them.

What are our defences?

Government agencies, intelligence services and private sector specialists all play a role. Telcos and network operators run their own security teams.

They monitor networks, manage risks and respond to incidents. This includes both cyber threats and physical risks.

Engineers and contractors maintain the physical infrastructure. That includes cables, exchanges and data centres.

Responsibility is shared.

• Network operators secure their own assets
• Contractors handle maintenance and field work
• Government agencies oversee national security risks

Physical protection ranges from controlled access at key sites to monitoring cable routes and landing stations.

Resilience matters

New Zealand’s networks face risks beyond cyber attacks. Severe weather, earthquakes and accidental damage can all disrupt services. Cable cuts remain the most common cause of major outages.

Operators design networks to limit the impact. They build redundancy with multiple routes and landing points, including fibre networks across the country. Traffic can be rerouted when faults occur, although capacity and performance may be affected.

Resilience is not just about infrastructure. It also depends on how quickly faults are detected and fixed. Monitoring systems, standby capacity and pre-planned response procedures all help reduce downtime.

Coordination and response

Because no single organisation oversees network security, coordination is important

Telcos, infrastructure providers and government agencies share information about threats and incidents, often within the framework set by telecommunications regulation. This helps identify risks early and respond more quickly when problems occur.

In serious cases, responses can involve multiple parties, including network operators, emergency services and national security agencies. The aim is to restore services and limit wider disruption.

Further reading on network and cyber security

• National Cyber Security Centre
• Government Communications Security Bureau
• Kordia

This page is part of a series of background briefings on New Zealand’s telecommunications industry:

• Submarine cables in New Zealand

In this edition:

• Tech leaders call for action to reap network benefits
• Responses to  Fibre Input Methodologies (IM) Review
• One NZ signs API deal with Vodafone

2026 Digital Priorities report shows work needed

New Zealand’s tech leaders say the nation’s digital strategy problem is not infrastructure, but putting networks to work.

Presenting the organisation’s 2026 Digital Priorities report, Tuanz CEO and panel chair Craig Young summed up its findings: “We have world class infrastructure but we can’t rely on those strong foundations anymore. We actually have to do something with it.”

Execution is key

Shannon Harris, managing director of HP New Zealand, echoes the idea. She says there is “no shortage of technology… but we have to execute… we have to do more and we have to do it faster.”

Harris says organisations are rethinking costs and architecture, questioning “how flexible or inflexible we’ll be over time”. That opens the door for hybrid models, edge computing and a bigger role for local infrastructure providers.

Security

Security and resilience add another layer of concern. AUT CIO Liz Gosling noted “the weaponisation of AI in the cyber security space keeps me awake at night.”

For One New Zealand CEO Jason Paris, scale is the issue. He says New Zealand produces strong digital use cases, but they are not widely shared or adopted. “Little old New Zealand is doing absolutely incredible things that no one knows about”.

Comment: We have the technology

There’s a clear message in this year’s Tuanz Digital Priorities report: New Zealand does not get all the value from its network.

We have excellent fibre coverage in our towns and, while gaps remain, there is high-quality connectivity almost everywhere. We attract growing data centre investment. Yet, so far, in economic terms the infrastructure investment is underperforming.

Tuanz found that by international standards New Zealand has low mobile data usage, slow cloud adoption and what it describes as “citizen disconnect”.

These are not new problems. Tuanz foreshadowed them in last year’s report. And they were being discussed, albeit with a different framing, as the fibre network was being built.

But now there is a sense of urgency. AI is moving from its experimental phase and switching into production. The world appears to be entering a new technology era.

We’re only going to extract value from AI and cloud if we can use these technologies more intelligently. We need better execution.

New Zealand must create, recruit and retain the talent to make that happen.

Fibre IM Review: Who pays for network growth?

Submissions on the Commerce Commission’s 2027 Fibre Input Methodologies (IM) Review show a divide between infrastructure owners and a leading retail service provider over how investment risks and costs should be shared with New Zealand consumers.

It boils down to who gets to pay for an extended fibre network.

Input Methodologies are the framework of rules used by the Commerce Commission to set the maximum revenue and quality standards for fibre companies.

Chorus: Streamlining for growth

Chorus largely supports the Commission’s push to simplify the regulatory framework but seeks more flexibility in capital expenditure (capex). As the initial fibre rollout concludes, Chorus proposes merging "connection capex" with "base capex" to reduce administrative overhead.

The company also disputes the proposed $30 million threshold for individual project reviews, suggesting $10 million instead to ensure smaller, complex projects are properly scrutinised.

Chorus also argues for a "lighter regulatory touch" on government-funded expansions, claiming reduced red tape will ultimately lower costs for consumers.

Enable seeks stability and shared risk

Christchurch-based Enable generally aligns with Chorus but prioritises regulatory stability. Unlike Chorus, Enable supports retaining the "Integrated Fibre Plan" over a more generic asset management format.

Enable argues that service rebates—payments made to retailers when the network fails—should be treated as a "cost of doing business”. This would allow fibre companies to recover those costs through regulated pricing rather than absorbing them as losses.

Spark wants competition protected

The sole retail submitter, Spark, is highly critical of settings that might allow "perverse" costs to reach customers. Spark argues the proposed "Willingness to Pay" test for network expansion overstates benefits by ignoring existing broadband options like 5G or satellite.

Spark also warns against "connection incentives”. These are payments used to lure customers to fibre. It fears they could unfairly disadvantage alternative technologies. Spark says consumers should not be forced to subsidise network expansion or the penalties incurred by providers for poor service performance.

One NZ signs API agreement with Vodafone

One New Zealand has signed a deal with its former parent company Vodafone, giving it access to Network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Telecoms sector network APIs support activities such as real-time anti-fraud verification, device status checks, secure authentication and digital identity solutions.

Murray Osborne, general manager of One NZ’s Infrastructure Partners says: “This agreement helps us to unlock the full value of our network through globally standardised APIs”.

He says this “Opens new frontiers in app development across sectors including financial services, media and e-commerce.”

With it, developers will be able to integrate capabilities such as number verification, SIM swap detection, and network-based authentication to improve security, help to tackle fraud and deliver smoother customer experiences.

In other news...

• Halter’s direct-to-satellite smart collars — RNZ
  Removes need for on-farm towers — NZ Herald
• Government advertises for under 16 media ban leader —
  The law hasn’t been passed or even debated yet.
• The benefit of AI has become a lot clearer — Mike Hosking Breakfast
  2degrees Andrew Fairgray talks about the telco’s recent report on the local impact of AI.

Tait opens Chile office

Christchurch-based Tait Communications has opened an office in Santiago, Chile to serve customers in South America. The company says it has partners in Chile, Peru, Argentina and Ecuador. One of its main focuses in the region is communications for mining and public safety applications.

NCSC: cyber harm falls as New Zealanders improve defences

Research published by the National Cyber Security Centre found the number of people who suffered harm from an online threat fell from 36 percent in 2024 to 27 percent in 2025.

NCSC chief operating officer Michael Jagusch says this shows people are taking action to protect themselves.

The research, undertaken by The Research Agency, found more people using password managers and two-factor authentication on their main online accounts.

This time last year

Tuanz released the 2025 edition of its Digital Priorities report calling on government to take a stronger, more co-ordinated approach. The same idea was embedded in this year’s report, see the story higher up this page. It’s a perennial problem.

Five years ago in Download Weekly

A ruling at the Auckland District Court found Vodafone guilty of nine Fair Trading Act charges over its FibreX brand. FibreX was the name Vodafone used when it rebranded its HFC network to compete with the UFB fibre network. The service is currently being retired.

Download Weekly is a New Zealand telecommunications industry newsletter. You are welcome to pass it on to your friends and colleagues. While the newsletter is free, reader support helps enormously. If you’re reading this for work, donations are tax-free. A banner at the top of the page will take you to the support site.

Have your say. Sign up as a subscriber, it is free, to comment on any of the stories on this site. We don’t collect any personal data other than an email address.

Mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) buy wholesale services from mobile networks and sell them to customers.
They can do this without needing to own or invest in network infrastructure.

Often run by well-known consumer companies, MVNOs typically focus on price, branding and address niche markets or customer needs not fully serviced by the major carriers.

Mobile as a brand extension

Warehouse Mobile is an example. It extends a retail brand into mobile services, focusing on low-cost, no-frills plans aimed at budget-conscious users.

Small MVNO market

New Zealand’s MVNO market is small by international standards: around two percent of the market. In Australia MVNOs are close to 20 percent of the market.

Elsewhere in the OECD the share typically ranges from 10 to 20 percent.

Despite their small size, MVNOs bring a degree of competition and innovation to the market without changing the underlying structure.

Why MVNO uptake is low

Intense competition among the three major carriers leaves little room for MVNOs to compete on price, which is often a primary entry strategy for virtual operators.

New Zealand’s largest MVNO, Skinny, is not a true independent operator but Spark’s budget brand. It was created to provide a low-cost option without cannibalising Spark’s core premium market, effectively occupying the space an independent MVNO might otherwise fill.

Mergers have reduced the number of MVNO subscribers. For instance, the Vocus-2degrees merger caused MVNO subscriber numbers to drop from 106,000 in 2021 to 77,000 in 2022 because Vocus was previously an MVNO on another network.

The Commerce Commission has previously found the mobile market to be sufficiently competitive without an active MVNO sector and has historically decided not to take specific action to stimulate it.

More recently the Commerce Commission has been looking at potential regulatory intervention to address the "nascent" wholesale mobile market and the lack of MVNOs in New Zealand.

New Zealand’s MVNO market remains small by international standards and is shaped by the structure of the mobile sector. While virtual operators offer alternative pricing and service options, their influence is limited compared with countries where wholesale access is more developed.

‌ Further reading on mobile virtual network operators

• What is a mobile virtual network operator?
• New Zealand has fewer MVNOs than most countries
• MVNOs call for regulatory action on satellite texting

This page is part of a series of background briefings on New Zealand’s telecommunications industry:

• Telecommunications regulation in New Zealand
• Fibre networks in New Zealand
• Rural telecommunications in New Zealand
• New Zealand telecommunications industry

In this edition:

• ISPANZ seeks intervention on MVNO satellite access
• 2degrees’ mobile market share rises
• TCF updates Product Disclosure Code
• MBNZ April 2026 charts changing landscape
  

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ISPs accuse carriers of satellite texting lockout

The Internet Service Provider Association of New Zealand (ISPANZ) says mobile carriers have squeezed MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) out of the satellite texting market.

That has left them unable to be part of what they regard as critical rural safety infrastructure.

MVNO access dispute

In a letter to the Commerce Commission, ISPANZ chief executive David Haynes describes what he calls and anti-competitive practice. Haynes calls on the Commission to investigate the withholding of satellite texting from MVNOs.

He writes: “If current practice by One NZ and Spark is in breach of the Commerce Act, direct them to comply with the Act and make satellite texting available to MVNOs, or if current practice is not currently contrary to the Commerce Act, arrange for MBIE to draft an appropriate bill to ensure that it is.”

One New Zealand and Spark both offer satellite texting to their customers through the Starlink satellite network At the time of writing, 2degrees has yet to begin its service which will use the rival AST SpaceMobile satellites (LEO direct-to-device).

A previous commitment

ISPANZ says One NZ had previously committed to make satellite texting available to MVNOs on April 1, 2026. When the deadline passed, the telco told ISPANZ members it had made a business decision not to deliver.

The letter argues there is no technical reason for this as One NZ’s Farmside subsidiary has this capability. It also notes that One NZ enabled satellite messaging for MVNOs during recent civil emergencies.

ISPANZ argues the emergency activation is evidence that the withholding is deliberate and anti-competitive, not operational.

Spark is also mentioned, but the company has only recently started its satellite texting service.

MVNOs losing business

The argument says that because customers now demand satellite texting, the MVNOs are now losing business to the networks that host them.

New Zealand’s MVNO market is already tiny by international standards. Here it is around 2 percent of the market. In Australia MVNOs are close to 20 percent of the market. Elsewhere in the OECD the share ranges from 10 to 20 percent.

Satellite communications in New Zealand market overview 2026

How satellite services fit into New Zealand’s telecommunications market, including infrastructure, regulation and emerging mobile services.

Bill BennettBill Bennett

2degrees increases mobile market share

Telcowatch reports that 2degrees has increased its share of the mobile market for seven quarters in a row.

In the first quarter of 2026, 2degrees’ was up 1.45 percent taking the total year-on-year growth to 3.6 percent. The company now has 27 percent of the mobile market putting it in third place behind Spark when combined with its Skinny brand and One NZ.

Most of 2degree’s growth came at Spark’s expense. The company’s branded mobile network dropped 1.5 percent in the recent quarter and a total of 2.4 percent over the last year. Spark’s Skinny brand fared worse over the year dropping by 3.1 percent.

Spark falls as 2degrees rises

Just as 2degrees has enjoyed seven quarters of market share growth, Spark’s share has declined for seven quarters.

Skinny’s long-term decline halted in the first quarter with the company adding 0.6 percent market share.

Speaking at the time of Spark’s half-year result for the period ending December 2025, CEO Jolie Hodson said mobile momentum is returning, with service revenue up 1.6 percent to $499 million.

She emphasised that Spark is "reaffirming leadership in mobile connectivity”. This squares with the Telcowatch survey.

Spark now sits at 32 percent of the market while its Skinny brand is a six percent. This gives the pair a combined share of 38 percent. This is just in front of One New Zealand’s 36 percent. One NZ’s market share has been flat over the past year growing just 0.2 percent.

Analysis: mobile market stable

Last year, the Commerce Commission’s 2024 Telecommunications Monitoring Report noted the concentrated nature of the mobile market with Spark, One NZ and 2degrees collectively controlling 97.5 percent of the market.

The remaining 2.5 percent are the mobile virtual network operators. Their share of the New Zealand market is one of the lowest in the OECD. It is telling that Telcowatch doesn’t bother to mention them in its quarterly reports.

In its Monitoring Report, the Commerce Commission says mobile is a “stable three-player oligopoly” that has experienced little disruption.

That is underlined by the Telecowatch numbers. Spark’s relative decline and 2degrees’ relative growth over the the last year is greater than most years, but still stable.

TCF updates Product Disclosure Code

New Zealand’s Telecommunications Forum has updated its Product Disclosure Code. The mandatory code sets out minimum information disclosure rules for consumer broadband plans.

It includes a product description template that service providers should use when setting out their broadband plans.

The change is a response to the Commerce Commission’s October 2025 Product Disclosure – Price and Cost Guidelines.

Monitoring Broadband Report shows shifting landscape

While speeds remain steady in the April 2026 Measuring Broadband New Zealand report, it notes changing market conditions.

The Commerce Commission says it has not included results for HFC plans due to low numbers. This comes as One NZ begins to retire the network.

Numbers are included for LEO satellites, but the report notes that Starlink has updated its New Zealand residential plans to a tiered structure, replacing the Residential and Residential Lite plans with Residential 100Mbps, Residential 200Mbps and Residential Max plans. It says this change will be reflected in the next MBNZ report.

Key changes in April report

Faster Game Downloads: High-end Fibre and LEO Satellite plans showed an improvement in the time taken to download large game files like Hogwarts Legacy.

Starlink Improvement: MBNZ saw a jump in the percentage of Starlink households able to support multiple simultaneous UHD streams, particularly for the ‘Residential Lite’ plan which climbed from 59 percent to 84 percent.

In other news:

• Spark uses satellite for roaming — NZ Herald
  Customers travelling to Japan will get access.
• Fibre is no longer a utility — OpenSignal
  ‌”Performance is not defined by top speeds, but by consistency”.
• HBO Max to launch as Sky faces fresh cloud — The Post
  Local streaming market continues to fragment.

Primo appoints Shewen as GM

Taranaki-based regional telco Primo has appointed Andrew Shewen as the company's first general manager.

Shewen brings a mix of telecommunications experience and business insight to his role at Primo. He has previously worked in technology, operations and project delivery. He worked for Spark as a client lead and has spent time in the oil and gas sector as well as in his own ventures.

Shewen was appointed at the end of March, taking over day-to-day operations while the company’s founder, Matthew Harrison, focuses on network strategy and growth. He says his priorities are maintaining Primo’s customer-first culture and strengthening systems to support sustainable growth, while continuing the company’s strong connection to its Taranaki community.

Thomson takes TDR reins

Commerce Commission director of transformation Simon Thomson is the new chief executive of Telecommunications Dispute Resolution. An announcement on Linkedin says Thomson has ‘previously led telecommunications regulatory work and contributed to telecommunications policy at an international level’.

Cloud infrastructure spending up 29 percent

A report from research company Omdia says worldwide cloud infrastructure spending surged 29 percent to US$110.9 billion in Q4 2025. The growth was driven by a shift from AI experimentation to full-scale production.

Hyperscalers are aggressively expanding capacity, with Google Cloud leading growth at 50 percent, followed by Microsoft Azure at 39 percent and AWS at 24 percent.

With the market now moving toward AI agents and automated workflows, Omdia forecasts a further 27 percent increase in 2026.

Five years ago in Download Weekly

All three mobile carriers moved to re-establish roaming after a pandemic-era collapse in overseas travel. While roaming is only a small part of revenue for mobile carriers, it has high margins.

Ten years ago

New submarine cables could revive New Zealand data centre investment. New Zealand’s reputation as a low-cost, renewable home for data centres had previously stalled for lack of connectivity. As we now know, the arrival of the Tasman Global Access and Hawaiki cables changed that, triggering a wave of data centre investments that continue today.

Internet exchange points (IXPs) are where networks connect and exchange data. They allow internet service providers, content companies and other network operators to pass traffic directly between each other.

In principle, this keeps local traffic within New Zealand. Instead of sending data through international transit providers, networks can exchange it locally. In practice, not all networks peer domestically, so some traffic still travels via overseas routes.

Local peering means lower latency and lower costs.

What internet exchange points do

IXPs provide a meeting place for networks. Participants connect their infrastructure and agree to exchange traffic, a process known as peering.

Without IXPs, much of this traffic would travel via third-party networks, often taking longer routes. By connecting directly, networks can improve performance and make more efficient use of capacity.

IXPs in New Zealand

New Zealand’s IXPs are mainly located in Auckland, close to the country’s largest data centres and where most international cables land. This reflects where networks are concentrated, but interconnection also supports users and services across the country.

New Zealand’s long, narrow geography also shapes how IXPs are used. While much interconnection is centred in Auckland, traffic from other regions may still travel significant distances within the country even when it remains local.

A wide range of organisations use IXPs, including internet service providers, content delivery networks and cloud platforms.

Why they matter in New Zealand

New Zealand’s distance from major global hubs makes efficient routing important. Keeping traffic within the country where possible improves performance for users and reduces reliance on international links.

IXPs also play a role in resilience. Local interconnection means some traffic can continue to flow even if there are problems with international connectivity.

The reality: not all traffic stays local

In practice, not all traffic between New Zealand networks is exchanged locally. Some smaller providers rely on international transit or interconnection in Australia, meaning data can leave the country before returning. The impact varies depending on the networks involved.

How IXPs fit into the network

IXPs sit between access networks such as fibre and mobile, and the data centres where services are hosted. They complement submarine cables by helping determine how traffic moves within New Zealand, rather than how it reaches the rest of the world.

Further reading on internet exchange points
• What is an Internet Exchange Point (IXP)?
• NZ Internet Exchange
• How internet peering works

This page is part of a series of background briefings on New Zealand’s telecommunications industry:
• Data centres in New Zealand
• Fibre networks in New Zealand
• Submarine cables in New Zealand
• Mobile networks in New Zealand

See Enable Networks ownership review signals possible sale in the April 17 edition The Download Weekly.

Christchurch City Council’s investment arm Christchurch City Holdings Ltd is reviewing ownership of Enable Networks. While there is nothing official, the review raises the prospect of a partial or full sale of one of New Zealand’s four fibre wholesalers.

Enable owns and operates the ultra-fast broadband fibre network across Greater Christchurch and surrounding areas. It is wholly owned by the council via CCHL.

The business was established in 2007 after concerns Christchurch was falling behind on fibre rollout. Later it became a partner in the government’s Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) programme.

At the time there was discussion regarding a partnership or potential merger of operations between Chorus (then a division of Telecom) and Enable. This was during the early days of the UFB rollout.

In 2011, Chorus and Enable entered into a formal partnership arrangement. Industry analysts at the time speculated this could lead to closer integration of their networks or even an eventual acquisition.

Enable’s network now passes more than 220,000 properties.

What triggered the review

The current interest in a potential sale comes after an ownership review was signalled in CCHL’s 2026 interim report.

While CCHL says its role is limited to assessing options and advising councillors, the review has been widely interpreted as a precursor to a potential sale.

This is backed up by a report in The Australian newspaper that says Macquarie Capital has been engaged to explore options for a transaction that could value Enable at up to $1 billion.

Neither CCHL nor the council has confirmed the bank’s role or the scope of any mandate.

How much is Enable worth?

A $1 billion valuation appears at the upper end of expectations. Enable’s most recent financials point to a lower figure. CCHL places its “investment value” at $714 million. The company reports total assets of about $892 million.

Enable generated $41.1 million in net profit last year and paid a $25 million dividend to the council. This make it a steady income-generating asset. However, it also carries roughly $294 million in debt.

A sale would require approval from elected councillors and is likely to trigger a formal public consultation process, given Enable’s status as a strategic asset under local government rules. CCHL cannot independently divest major holdings.

Council divisions

The review has exposed divisions within Christchurch’s political leadership. The arguments are familiar from earlier asset sale debates involving New Zealand local government.

Some councillors argue there is no democratic mandate to consider selling Enable and have questioned both the transparency of the process and the use of external advisers. Others say regularly testing the value and strategic fit of council-owned assets is standard governance practice. They stress that no decision has been made.

Debate also centres on what a sale would achieve. Those in favour of asset recycling argue proceeds could reduce council debt or fund new infrastructure. Critics counter that selling a profitable, future-proof utility risks sacrificing long-term income and control for short-term gains.

Comparable deals

Beyond local politics, there has been a wave of telecommunications infrastructure and related deals in New Zealand. The retail telcos have sold their mobile towers in deals that attracted strong interest from overseas pension funds. More recently Spark sold a majority stake in its data centre business.

In 2020, Ultrafast Fibre (now Tuatahi First Fibre) was sold to First State Investments, an Australian asset management company for $854 million.

Using the 2020 sale as a rough benchmark, it implied a valuation of $5,000–$5,500 per active connection. Applying a similar range to Enable’s roughly 150,000 active connections suggests a valuation in the region of $800 million.

A changed market

Market conditions have changed. In 2020 Ultrafast didn’t have to compete with 5G fixed wireless broadband or with low earth satellite alternatives. These factors may influence how a potential buyer assesses Enable’s long-term value.

Enable’s recent $41.1 million profit implies a return in the order of five percent, broadly consistent with investor expectations for regulated infrastructure assets.

Infrastructure investors often talk in terms of WACC (Weighted Average Cost of Capital). Regulators like the Commerce Commission set a target WACC to ensure companies like Enable make enough money to stay healthy and keep investing, but not so much that they are taking advantage of their monopoly.

Enable hitting that $41.1 million mark suggests they are operating right in that goldilocks zone—profitable enough to be a crown jewel for the Council, but efficient enough to keep the regulator happy.

Living with the regulator

A new Enable owner would need to operate within New Zealand’s fibre regulatory framework, including oversight by the Commerce Commission and the requirement to provide wholesale-only fibre services to retail providers. That might be a barrier to some potential buyers, but it also implies certainty and predictability.

For now, any sale process remains exploratory. The existence of a review is confirmed, but the likelihood, timing and structure of any sale remain uncertain.

In this edition

• Copper to go two years earlier
• Enable Networks’ potential sale
• Amazon Leo expands ahead of launch

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Declining demand means copper will be gone by 2028

Chorus has moved forward its timetable to retire the copper network.

In a statement to the NZX, the fibre company says it will complete copper’s planned retirement in 2028. This is two years ahead of the previous 2030 timetable.

Chief executive Mark Aue had previously indicated in public speeches that the company intended to complete the copper retirement ahead of the original schedule.

Changing demand

This week he said the change reflects declining demand for copper services and regulatory changes. In the current quarter, copper connections dropped more than 14 percent, a sharp fall from 63,000 to 53,000.

Regulations mean Chorus can't just keep the network running at a loss. Retiring the technology is not just a choice, but a regulatory constraint.

Aue says: “Customers are choosing more modern and reliable technologies like fibre, fixed wireless or satellite and our plans need to reflect that.

“Maintaining a nationwide legacy network being used by 2.5 percent of households when there are more cost-effective, modern alternatives is no longer efficient.”

Connections growing for first time in a decade

During the March quarter, Chorus experienced the first growth in connection numbers since 2013. It gained 13,000 fibre connections and lost a total of 10,000 copper connections. This happened despite the accelerating drop in copper connections.

Rising fibre adoption and data demand

Fibre adoption and data demand continue to rise. In the March 2026 quarter, Chorus saw the strongest quarterly fibre growth since the September quarter of 2023.

Monthly average data use on the Chorus network is up eight percent year-on-year. In March 2025, it was 642 GB, in March 2026, it reached 696 GB. The highest month on record was January 2026, when users on average consumed 722 GB. Business data use is up 19 percent year-on-year to 1,174 GB in March 2026.

By March 2026, 19 percent of fibre connections used more than 1 TB of data, up from 17 percent a year earlier. Fibre uptake is now at 73.1 percent.

Analysis: Copper retirement

At times it might appear that New Zealand hung on to its copper technology for longer than necessary. When should we rip out the copper network? was posted on this site in February 2014.

Many nations, including Singapore and Malaysia, completed their copper retirement years ago.

We sometimes hear that when Australia’s NBN built that nation’s fibre network, it removed copper as the fibre went in.

While true, that’s not the whole story. Australia’s NBN model overbuilt fibre to the premises in selected areas, then decommissioned copper locally. Yet there are still many areas that are on fixed wireless, satellite or HFC (hybrid fibre-coaxial). Its full copper retirement is also a phased, multi-year process, not an instantaneous cutover.

New Zealand’s cautious approach is similar to many other countries.

The UK will complete its switch-off in January 2027 after resolving challenges with medical alarms and critical infrastructure. Japan has set a 2035 target.

New Zealand's 2028 goal, while later than the UK's, reflects similar pressures: managing vulnerable users, rising maintenance costs and ensuring rural customers have alternatives like fixed wireless and satellite.

That timeline became possible only after the Commerce Commission recommended deregulating copper services in 2025, finding that competition from wireless and satellite had made copper regulation obsolete.

Enable Networks ownership review signals possible sale

A recent ownership review of Enable Networks by Christchurch City Council’s investment arm Christchurch City Holdings Ltd has been interpreted by some commentators as signalling a potential sale of the fibre company.

Earlier this month, The Australian newspaper reported that Macquarie Capital had been asked to investigate a potential sale of the business that has the monopoly rights to ultra-fast broadband in the city.

A separate analysis on billbennett.co.nz sets out the valuation, the comparable deals and the politics.

Globalstar acquisition expands Amazon Leo satellite network

Amazon has agreed to pay more than $11.5 billion to buy mobile satellite services company Globalstar.

The deal does little to boost the scale of Amazon’s Leo network, which is expected to launch later this year. Globalstar only has 24 satellites to add to the 241 Amazon currently has in orbit.

Amazon wants the company for three reasons. Globalstar has 30 years’ experience of operating in what has become the direct-to-device space and owns considerable intellectual property. Moreover, Globalstar owns Block 53. This is a licensed spectrum band from 2483.5 to 2495 MHz that is particularly well-suited for direct-to-device communications.

Globalstar’s other key asset is its relationship with Apple. The computer and phone maker owns 20 percent of the business and uses Globalstar for the emergency SOS satellite service now offered on iPhone and Apple Watch.

Amazon Leo is late to market and is a long way behind Starlink, which has a constellation of approaching 10,000 satellites and has already picked all the low-hanging fruit.

Amazon Leo reveals gigabit inflight antenna

Amazon Leo says its aviation antenna intended for commercial airlines can deliver shared download speeds of up to 1 Gbps and uploads of 400 Mbps.

Like Starlink’s Aero Terminal, the antenna is installed on the outside of commercial jets where it connects with low-Earth orbit satellites.

In other news...

• Tait Systems New Zealand on fourth CEO in a year — RNZ
  ‌ Public Safety Network project behind schedule and facing “cost pressures”
• South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access — The Register.
  ‌ Everyone gets unlimited 400 Kbps downloads after using data allowance.
• Wireless sector claims WiFi as secure as cellular — ITnews
  The key is having the right configuration.

Spark gets Auckland Airport duty free exclusive

Spark is now the only carrier operating in the duty free area at Auckland International Airport. A deal with Lagardere Travel Retail, which has an eight year concession for duty free at the airport, means Spark will be the first mobile provider visitors see as they arrive.

Worldwide phone shipments down six percent in first quarter of 2026

Counterpoint Research says a six percent drop in worldwide phone shipments is partly due to shortages of key Dram and Nand chips. The shortages have led to increased handset prices at a time consumers are wary because of the war in the Middle East.

Apple is the leading brand, growing five percent year-on-year to gain a 21 percent market share. Demand for the iPhone 17 is strong. The company’s tightly managed supply chain means it is less affected by the shortages than some rivals.

Five years ago on Download Weekly

April 2021’s Measuring Broadband New Zealand report showed a marked speed improvement for Fibre Max plans. This followed previous MBNZ reports of underperforming plans with customers seeing a wide range of speeds. In some cases, they were less than half the nominal one Gbps speeds customers believed they were buying.

Ten years ago

A contract between Hawaiki Submarine Cable LP and TE SubCom came into force, triggering the start of the network’s construction phase. The April 2016 story looks at the background to Hawaiki and includes comments from rivals.

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The internet of things (IoT) connects physical devices to digital networks. In New Zealand it is widely used, particularly in rural industries, infrastructure and utilities.

IoT ‘things’ can be devices, machines, vehicles or infrastructure. In the home they can be domestic appliances. They are equipped with sensors, software and connectivity that allows them to collect and exchange data.

The technology is already embedded into everyday life. In New Zealand cities it includes connected bus shelters, smart bins and other smart city infrastructure. In rural areas farmers use IoT for precision farming, livestock tracking and environmental monitoring.

Operational IoT

Network operators, in energy as well as in the telecom sector, use IoT to transform operations. It enables predictive maintenance, asset tracking and process automation.

Linking the physical world to the digital world means we can monitor, analyse and act on real-time information. Coupled with automation and AI, IoT users can run large scale operations.

IoT systems combine devices, connectivity, data processing and applications that trigger action.

Challenges

There are challenges. Security is a major concern. Cyber criminals and hostile nations see networks of connected devices as a potential entry point for attacks.

Data privacy is another issue, particularly in consumer and healthcare applications where sensitive information is involved.

Another challenge is interoperability. There is a lack of common standards for the hardware and the systems.

Meanwhile IoT applications can generate vast volumes of data that needs moving and storage.

IoT networks

IoT networks are well established in New Zealand. We use a mix of cellular and non-cellular networks to support IoT, reflecting the need to cover both dense cities and remote rural areas.

Two of the main carriers provide widespread networks. Technologies used for IoT include the 4G mobile network, LTE-M, LoRaWAN and NB-IoT.

• 4G mobile networks support higher-bandwidth IoT applications and act as a fallback where specialised IoT networks are not available.
• LTE-M (Long Term Evolution for Machines) is a low-power wide area network (LPWAN) technology designed for IoT devices that require higher data rates and mobility.
• NB-IoT (Narrowband Internet of Things) is optimised for low-power, low-data-rate applications. It has excellent building penetration and long-range connectivity for stationary devices.
• LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is a non-cellular LPWAN technology that operates on unlicensed radio frequencies. It is designed for ultra-low power consumption, allowing sensors to operate for years on a single battery while transmitting small amounts of data over very long distances.

New Zealand carriers offer private 5G networks. 5G mobile networks can also be used for IoT applications.

Private networks using 5G have low latency making the technology suitable for real-time control of manufacturing and autonomous vehicles. It can also handle high device density and higher data rates for applications like high definition video.

Satellite IoT

More recently low Earth orbit satellite network operators have talked up their IoT capabilities especially where devices are located in remote areas.

Satellite IoT is still emerging as a way of extending the IoT footprint. Potentially it will set up competition between terrestrial low-power networks and the new frontier of Direct-to-Cell satellites.

New Zealand IoT has already moved away from trial projects and toward mass-scale industrial use.

Further reading on IoT:

• IoT Forum New Zealand
• Tech Target - What is IoT?
• How does IoT work?

This page is part of a series of background briefings on New Zealand’s telecommunications industry:
• Mobile networks in New Zealand
• Rural telecommunications in New Zealand
• Satellite communications in New Zealand
• Fibre networks in New Zealand