Christchurch’s local fibre company, Enable, has today launched a one Gigabit wholesale residential fibre broadband service across its coverage area in Christchurch and surrounding towns.
“This is a very exciting development in the broadband market. A service capable of delivering up to a Gigabit broadband speeds is hands down the fastest residential broadband service ever to be available to Christchurch homes,” said Enable CEO, Steve Fuller. In the last year the demand for Enable’s fibre broadband has increased dramatically in Christchurch. More and more people are making the switch to fibre broadband – with Enable receiving thousands of new orders per month.
People are also choosing to consume more of the faster services available over Enable’s network. “Enable’s focus – as a local fibre provider, owned by the Christchurch community – is to innovate to make the very best fibre broadband connectivity available to our community,” said Mr Fuller. “We are seeing a big shift in the types of fibre broadband services Christchurch people are consuming and the launch of this new Gigabit service provides local families with an assurance that Enable’s network will meet their broadband needs today and well into the future.” The majority of residential customers are now ordering services with download speeds of 100Mbps or 200Mbps, rather than the base-level 30Mbps that served homes well when we launched fibre broadband to the mass-market in 2012.
What is more, significant numbers of existing fibre broadband users are upgrading to faster speeds. “These behaviours clearly demonstrate the growing consumer need for faster, higher quality broadband as we all connect more devices, turn to more online entertainment options and expect online video to be ultra-high definition,” added Mr Fuller.
Enable’s new wholesale service also provides very fast upload speeds of 500Mbps – which ensures this new service is very future-focussed. “Upload speeds are becoming increasingly important to consumers and will become even more important in the future. Upload speeds impact the rate at which we can safely store our family memories in the cloud or share our own creative content online,” said Mr Fuller.
“We will work with our retail service providers to support them to launch their new services to homes in Christchurch, Rangiora, Kaiapoi, Woodend, Rolleston and Lincoln as soon as possible.”
The technical details of the new one Gigabit wholesale service are that it runs at the maximum physical limits of the current residential on-property Enable network equipment – with a maximum download speed of 1Gbps and maximum upload speed of 550Mbps. The speeds measured by customers connected to retail broadband services based on this wholesale service may vary depending on a range of factors.
