Is your business ready?
Soon, more fibre will become available across our towns and cities as the Government’s Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) initiative gathers pace. But what will this new connectivity mean for your business, and are you getting ready? Gen-i CEO Chris Quin explores some of the opportunities this new infrastructure promises to bring.
Last month signalled the start of an exciting new journey for Gen-i, as part of the “New Telecom”, As you have probably heard, our shareholders voted by an overwhelming majority to demerge Chorus.
This has enabled Chorus, as a stand-alone, separately listed company, to take a leading role in the Government’s Ultra-fast Broadband (UFB) initiative, as the Crown’s partner for approximately 70% of the UFB roll-out.
And it has set Gen-i, as part of the “New Telecom”, on an exciting new path as we prepare to play a significant role in delivering New Zealand’s fibre future.
This means that soon there will be much more fibre available to businesses across New Zealand’s towns and cities, but the real challenge now facing us is how we turn this fibre infrastructure into economic return.
UFB provides an exciting new opportunity for our clients to adopt ICT solutions that harness fibre speeds to increase productivity, improve their flexibility and robustness, and cut costs.
We have been planning for its arrival, and already offer a wide range of fibre-based products, and are eager to have as many of our clients on fibre as soon as is possible.
We look forward to working closely with you to make sure your business is tooled up and ready to take advantage of the new fibre capacity and coverage, as soon as it is available to you and it makes sense for your architecture, environment and network.
We believe most corporate locations will be covered by fibre by 2014 and we expect a significant proportion of client networks will migrate to fibre connections in the next two years.
However, UFB provides “access” and it is important for businesses to choose the services that will enable the best gains from UFB for them.
Our clients are looking to us to provide the exciting applications and services that make the most of this new fibre world, in areas such as videoconferencing and collaboration, cloud computing, remote working and business continuity.
For one of our clients, Colorite, fibre has enabled high-speed links between their branches across the country, enabling them to share large graphics files, and bringing the separate locations closer together.
Colorite Group IT manager Philip Parkinson explains: “We discovered we could do a lot more with fibre - it has really changed the way the company works. It unlocks a lot of potential with what you can do and it’s only going to get better.”
We believe for the next three to four years, most networks will be a mixture of copper, fibre and mobile.
Our clients are relying on us to provide robust and resilient hybrid networks that integrate fibre, copper and mobile, as well as construct networks using fibre from multiple providers.
With several fibre providers across the country, there is potential for network fragmentation and complexity for businesses wanting to take advantage of new options available.
Our clients also want assurance that their infrastructure is kept secure and robust by a local service provider, who can take accountability for the outcomes right here in New Zealand, and with priorities driven by this market.