With all the anticipation around the national UFB roll out it’s often overlooked that there are other providers with significant infrastructure throughout New Zealand.

Unison have a fibre network covering parts of Hawkes Bay, Taupo and Rotoura their fibre footprint can be found using the address checker at www.unisonfibre.co.nz Unison are more known for their work in maintaining power lines in the mid North Island but completed their roll out of 350km of fibre several years ago.

When moving our business into a bigger premises several months ago we assessed our options for internet connectivity, at the time we were on VDSL and quite happy with the performance however the advantages of fibre a tempting proposition.

Trying to get any kind of interest from regular ISPs on connecting us to fibre was near impossible, despite calls to ISPs none decided to return calls, we have been on Orcon and Vodafone’s ‘register your interest’ for now several years with no contact from either, more frustrating that the Chorus fibre capped duct is literally right outside the front door.

Our timeframes were tight with only 4 weeks until move date, this was also going to be a problem with Chorus who need the Queens approval to put fibre into the building. On the tread here on geekzone explaining the issues David from Unison popped up and mentioned about Unison Fibre as an option.

The next day I contacted several ISPs who offered Unison Fibre in Rotorua Andrew from www.gofibre.co.nz contacted straight away, within several hours we’d signed a deal but quickly struck a snag with install costs ballooning however to their credit Unison and Go Fibre worked on a deal and an agreement that we could make the move in date. 

Go Fibre use www.fx.net.nz who have a handover here in Rotorua. Things went quickly and within a day the unison crew visited the site and had established the best route for entry of the fibre and within a further 24 hours had applied consent to dill a duct (consent time was 10 days) The guys turned up a couple of days later to do the internal work installing the termination point and ONT.



Sure enough about a week later the install team turned up again saying the fibre was in and ready to go.  All this in a couple of weeks and several weeks ahead of our moving date.



I’ve resisted a temptation to write this before now because I wanted to test the fibre in all sort of situations before coming to any conclusions.

So I keep being asked about speed tests so here you go this to Auckland:
 

But it really only tells part of the story.

ere’s what we’ve found so far:

We run several cisco sip based phones using 2talk – the quality of VOIP on Fibre has improved significantly.

Torrents seem to be capped at 1.5MB/s International downloads come in at between 1.5MB/s and 3MB/s we haven’t seen any speeds above this at this stage.

ownloads of drivers from HP only hit about 3X dialup speed eg 15kb/s

Locally cached stuff has been as high as 9MB/s

So a bit of a mixed bag but it did get me thinking about how great it would be if the amount of international bandwidth available per customer had to be disclosed by the ISP via some sort of rating system.

While the price is higher for fibre I think it is worth the investment for our business, the improvement over VDSL however is not as pronounced as what I thought it would be mainly due to limits on international bandwidth.

I would like to thank Andrew at Go Fibre and David and the team at Unison for making fibre possible and removing all barriers to make it happen.