Download Weekly: Review of 2024
One NZ squeaks over the line with its 100 percent coverage promise
At the end of December One New Zealand announced a very limited mobile to satellite service using SpaceX’s Starlink network. The story made our last 2024 edition: One NZ scores worldwide first as Starlink direct-to-mobile launches.
It’s debatable whether this means the telco delivered on the promise made when it rebranded from Vodafone to One NZ. At the time it boasted that the Starlink deal would deliver 100 percent coverage in 2024.
Did One NZ deliver on its advertised promise?
If you think a limited number of phones being able to make text messages once every two to ten minutes counts as 100 percent coverage, then it is mission accomplished.
That question will be officially resolved next year when One NZ defends the Commerce Commission’s criminal court action.
Regardless of the marketing, there’s no question satellite-to-mobile coverage won’t stay exclusive to One NZ and the service will improve eventually adding voice and data.
This is the biggest disruption to New Zealand telecommunications since Starlink tore up the rural broadband market. Speaking of which...
Low earth orbit satellites are making waves in rural New Zealand
In its 2024 Telecommunications Monitoring Report the Commerce Commission focused on the gaps remaining between rural and urban parts of the nation. While rural users continue to pay more and get less back, the arrival of SpaceX’s Starlink has reset competition in these areas.
Figures released in August 2024 say 14 percent of rural connections are on LEO satellite broadband. For now that means Starlink. The number of connections climbed from 12,000 to over 34,000 in a year. It will be higher today. At the time, New Zealand currently had the highest number of satellite connections per person in the OECD.
The downside of this means that policy makers and planners are inclined to view rural connectivity as no longer being a priority despite high numbers of less well off rural families being off the broadband grid.
Spark New Zealand exits the cell tower business
A decade ago Spark executives still talked about the company’s tower network as if it were a strategic asset. That changed, in part when the three main mobile networks achieved something close to parity in their tower networks. Competition has moved on from coverage maps.
It appears Spark would rather own data centres than cell towers.
2degrees on a post-merger roll
Two years after merging with Orcon, which was a renamed roll-up of Vocus’ New Zealand assets, 2degrees turned in a respectable set of financials. The company reported a seven percent increase in total revenue to $1.34 billion and a 16 percent EBITDA rise.
It is still around a third of the size of Spark, but the numbers are heading in the right direction. The business won market share in consumer and retail.
These numbers suggest 2degrees is having an effect on competition between telcos but this has yet to translate into lower prices across the board.
New Zealanders can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet data
Chorus reports that 17 percent of users on the company’s fibre network used more than a terabyte of data in November 2024. It calls these people “power users” meanwhile the average download hit 633GB.
On the weekend of November 2, traffic peaked on the Chorus network at 5.4 Tbps as a new edition of the Fortnite game came online at the same time the Black Caps cricket match against India was live streamed.
The company expects to see a terabyte each month to become the norm for all fibre users by 2029. It forecasts a 14 percent per annum growth over the next decade.
A decade ago in 2014 the average monthly data use on the network was 92GB. Customers on the copper network used 42GB. At the time the market was moving away from data caps.
Our demand for data seems insatiable. Which leads up to...
More data centres with the focus on Auckland for now
The year saw New Zealand’s data centre capacity continue to grow. Much of the activity was in Auckland, it makes sense to locate data centres close to the majority of customers, but keep an eye of Southland and Datagrid’s ambitious plans which include a new submarine network being built in partnership with Chorus.
CDC remains the largest regional player, but Spark has plans to increase its capacity by as much as 500 percent in coming years. Funding that expansion may be a problem and Spark’s investors are not yet convinced, but to date the company’s investment in data centres has paid off: Spark’s data centre business was a standout performer in this year’s financial result growing revenue 54.2 percent to $37 million.