It looks like the olive branch is out as various players in the telco sector seek to maximise the benefits of their involvement in the government’s Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) initiative.
Telecom offshoot Chorus is officially playing nice, saying it wants to make friends with the other companies involved in building the $1.35 billion network in order to ‘increase efficiencies across the UFB initiative’.
The Chorus business was ‘de-merged’ from Telecom last year as a condition of it winning a $929 million contract to build about 70% of the UFB.
Telecom/Chorus had pitched for 100% of the project – and at one point threatened to walk away if it wasn’t given the entire job – but is now sharing the build with three other ‘local fibre companies’ (LFCs).
Chorus’s role in the UFB build will see it lay fibre past 830,900 premises before the project’s 2020 completion date.
Rival UFB contractor Northpower is responsible for running the network past 20,000 premises in Whangarei; Ultrafast Fibre Limited has a 163,000 premise footprint in the central North Island, and Enable Networks is taking UFB to 182,000 premises in Canterbury.
In a presentation to analysts in Sydney last week, Chorus said one of its short-term business goals was to ‘Engage in partnership discussions with local fibre companies to increase efficiencies across the UFB Initiative’.
Other short-term goals include raising awareness about the benefits of migrating to fibre and developing new fibre-centric products in association with Retail Service Providers (RSPs) – the telco and internet companies (including Telecom) who will sell services over the UFB network.
Longer-term, Chorus says one of its focuses is to ‘guide transition to a fibre-centric world’; this would be achieved by developing new fibre-based products and services that would allow RSPs to take advantage of higher bandwidth technology.
These cooperative platitudes make sense. There is a real need for a major marketing push to sell the UFB to end users if the network is going to achieve the uptake the government is hoping for – not to mention the returns the RSPs would like to see.
In a similar indication of the move to industry harmony, this week we saw Telecom and Enable make a big deal of the LFC/RSP agreement they’ve just signed.
As more deals between network builders and retailers come on stream, we can expect an increase in volume from the chorus of telcos singing the praises of UFB.
Image source here.