Chorus has today encouraged customers to find out as much as possible about the wide range of broadband choices available to them before making decisions about their connections.

Chorus has given this advice in response to Spark’s announcement yesterday that it will trial aggressively moving its customers to either fibre or its own wireless broadband service in the Waikato.

The company says there are many more good choices for customers than just those two options with one provider.

“Of course we encourage as many customers as possible to get onto fibre wherever it is available, as it is unquestionably the superior service,” said Tim Harris, Chief Commercial Officer, Chorus. “The more challenging question for customers is what type of connection to choose if they are not yet ready to move to fibre.

“We strongly encourage customers to check out independent websites such as glimp.co.nz or broadbandcompare.co.nz to review the full range of products and pricing available to them, rather than relying on their service provider to tell them what’s best.

We’ve been saying for some time that many in New Zealand could upgrade their broadband for little or no extra cost and our own website, chorus.co.nz, can help identify if this is case.

Harris also said Spark’s statement yesterday contained several errors that Chorus wished to correct.

“It is Chorus’ view that Spark is selling its customers short by providing them with just two options, at the same time as dangerously misrepresenting the reliability of the copper broadband network.”

“Wireless broadband cannot match copper-based VDSL broadband for consistency of performance, reliability at peak times and the ability to have broadband without data caps.

“More than 50% of broadband connections are now unlimited, as customers come to expect to be able to use broadband without limits, and data use is growing rapidly. The uptake of unlimited plans has grown by 33% in just the last year and no fixed wireless provider is offering uncapped data plans.

Customers can check to see if VDSL is available to them at chorus.co.nz. With certain broadband providers customers can be upgraded from ADSL to VDSL for no extra monthly cost and no technician visit.

Spark’s statement also represented the Chorus copper network as having high levels of faults, due to low levels of investment. Chorus strongly refutes this claim.

- On average, a customer with a copper broadband connection is likely to experience a fault roughly once every five years, with downtime typically being less than a day

- Chorus has continued to invest in and improve the copper network, most recently expanding the VDSL footprint to 80% of lines this year

- Fault volumes have consistently declined year on year for the last 10 years

“We openly acknowledge that for a small proportion of older ADSL broadband customers that wireless broadband is likely to provide a better service, and we will openly tell customers that.

“However, it is confusing for customers to be given misleading information by service providers with their own agenda, which is why we strongly encourage customers to undertake independent research to get the very best broadband available to them. This is not necessarily the product their service provider always wants to sell them.”

A Chorus release