What is the area covered by UltraFast Fibre Limited?This will cover Hamilton (including Cambridge and Te Awamutu), Tauranga, Tokoroa, New Plymouth, Hawera and Wanganui. This accounts for just over 14% of UFB premises. What is the area covered by Northpower Limited?Whangarei, accounting for 1.6% of UFB premises. When will the physical deployments of fibre begin and where?The deployment is expected to start in Whangarei before Christmas and then in Hamilton, Wanganui and Tauranga in early 2011.What is the agreed pricing for fibre services?UFB pricing is at wholesale level and end-users should bear in mind that prices of retail UFB services will reflect non-Local Fibre Company costs, such as national backhaul, international bandwidth, provisioning, billing and so on. The following are indicative of expected products and prices and are initial prices only. Prices are per month excluding GST.Consumer: UFB entry-level (30 Megabits per second downstream / 10 Mbps upstream with a 2.5 Mbps committed information rate will be $40 or less. This is lower than the current wholesale price for Naked DSL services.The premium home product (100 Mbps Downstream / 50 Mbps Upstream with a 2.5 Mbps committed information rate) will be priced at $60 or less. Subscribers would recognise this service as ADSL2+ bundled with a standard home phone line.Business: Products will be priced considerably below existing Dark Fibre where this is available in the market. For example, a 1GB service will be priced around $600, which is about half the minimum current wholesale price.Schools: UFB products for schools are expected to be priced in a similar manner to business products but they’ll be lower, as the government is covering the cost of the fibre "drop” from a school’s boundary to its server room.What is a Local Fibre Company LFC?A LFC is a joint venture between Crown Fibre Holdings on behalf of the government and a private company to deploy, own and operate a fibre-to-the-premise network in one or more parts of New Zealand under the UFB initiative. They also sell access to point-to-point dark fibre or Layer 1 Services, and lit fibre (containing electronics), known as Layer 2 Services.What interest has there been from retail service providers (RSPs) or internet service providers (ISps) in providing services on these networks?Crown Fibre Holdings has been liaising with both RSPs and ISPs and identified strong interest in selling UFB wholesale products. Northpower, for example, already has active service providers delivering services in the marketplace. What measures have been taken to ensure uptake of services on these networks?UFB fibre will be competitively priced so as to attract users. Crown Fibre Holdings and the government are also working with industry and key stakeholder groups on a range of initiatives to maximise potential uptake
