Telecom New Zealand: Better connecting Kiwis

New Zealand’s Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI), which aims to deliver broadband to 252,000 rural households at prices and levels of service comparable with urban areas, is now going full steam ahead. Telecom New Zealand is playing a vital role, through its recent efforts to deliver a high-performance LTE experience at 700MHz throughout the countryside. This has attracted the attention of the Global 700M Industry Alliance, where the operator now sits as chair. David Havercroft, the operator’s COO, has the details.

By Julia Yao & Linda Xu

New Zealand’s Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI), which aims to deliver broadband to 252,000 rural households at prices and levels of service comparable with urban areas, is now going full steam ahead. Telecom New Zealand is playing a vital role, through its recent efforts to deliver a high-performance LTE experience at 700MHz throughout the countryside. This has attracted the attention of the Global 700M Industry Alliance, where the operator now sits as chair. David Havercroft, the operator’s COO, has the details.

Speed & coverage

WinWin: What efforts will Telecom New Zealand be making in the next few years to ubiquitize broadband?

David Havercroft: We have a pretty dynamic agenda in New Zealand. We started on this journey about a year ago with the strategic objective to try and build not only the best data network within New Zealand but also the best level of connectivity, connecting all our customers at the speed of life.

We began with a big 4G rollout in November of last year. We now have over 100,000 customers on that network every day. We are getting fantastic speeds for customers, up to 95Mpbs for download and about 50Mbps for upload at peak. And in all of the three cities (Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch) in New Zealand, we are getting great feedback for the 4G service. At the same time, we have also rolled out over a thousand Wi-Fi hotspots, and built out a very large transport network. Besides, we are just about to begin the 700MHz trial to provide even more coverage as well. There’s a very big theme we are using with the investment in networks - the best networks for New Zealand that provide the best services for customers. The whole 4G 700MHz strategy is absolutely critical to that.

Consumers want mobile services to be as ubiquitous as possible. It’s about coverage and quality of service. So having that ubiquity and quality together is a really important thing. We really do like the way Huawei approaches this through xMbps as a basis of network performance. We are very committed to that.

WinWin: What new and advanced features does Telecom New Zealand plan to employ over its 4G network in 2014?

Havercroft: We have obviously already begun the very first round. We went live with carrier aggregation in some sites like Auckland. That is, we are investing in where we can get maximum speeds. The next two really big ones are integration with our Wi-Fi, so 4G and Wi-Fi integration is going to be very important. The third one will be the rural coverage using 700MHz spectrum.

Town & country

WinWin: Why is rural LTE coverage so vital in New Zealand?

Havercroft: Rural areas contribute a massive part of New Zealand’s economy in terms of tourism and agriculture. They are the two largest single components of New Zealand economy in terms of GDP contribution and exports and foreign earnings. That’s why the government was very keen that operators and future owners of that spectrum stand by their commitments to rural communities when it was releasing the spectrum. It was already in New Zealand’s existing commitments under the Rural Broadband Initiative, sponsored by our government, to ensure that all operators do support rollout of broadband, both fixed and mobile, to rural communities. And certainly with 4G at 700MHz, there is also a strong commitment from operators, including ourselves, to expand very rapidly.

For us, it is not just rural coverage per se, but providing the economy, particularly the agribusiness economy, with a substantial level of service quality and new applications and services to really keep the industry running at a high level of efficiency. I think New Zealand’s agribusiness is probably one of the most efficient and productive in the world. It needs all sorts of modern technologies, especially connectivity technology, to keep improving.

WinWin: As mentioned, agriculture is a pillar of New Zealand’s economy. What kind of specific changes might LTE bring?

Havercroft: We deliberately decided to trial 700MHz in an agricultural area. There is a famous event called the New Zealand National Agricultural Fieldays, based on 98 hectares at Mystery Creek Events Centre in Hamilton. It attracts 140,000 people. It’s effectively a trade show for agribusinesses. Interestingly, we decided to begin our commercial launch of 700MHz there. We have already begun some trials on certain farms and are already seeing a lot of agribusinesses that need to look at productivity, and measure & track food movement, which is very important in the world today. For sourcing of the food, being clear about where it came from and where it’s been, technology, especially mobile technology, is going to play an increasing role.

APT700 leadership

WinWin: How do you see the momentum behind Asia-Pacific Telecommunity (APT) 700 adoption, particularly New Zealand?

Havercroft: For us in New Zealand, we do have a slight advantage over many places in that what’s usually, at the moment, the single thing stopping acceleration of rollout is existing use of that spectrum. New Zealand made a commitment a few years ago to move from analog TV to digital. As a consequence, the spectrum has been freed now for some time. As soon as we were allocated our share of spectrum in New Zealand, we were able to start our commercial trial, which we began this month. So that’s a good thing for us in New Zealand. But I do understand that a blocker for many countries is the regulatory environment, as they try to persuade the existing users of the spectrum to move off. I think that’s the most significant blockage to the ecosystem. The next blockage for us now is very much around devices, getting a very good range and ecosystem of devices to be able to provide customers with choices in not just 700MHz but also multiple bands.

WinWin: Telecom New Zealand was selected to chair the newly formed Global 700M Industry Alliance. How is Telecom New Zealand planning to drive the APT700 ecosystem?

Havercroft: We see that in two ways. Obviously we have been the ones who have services out there. We can share with other operators some of our experiences. At the event day, that is what we will be doing - starting the journey of explaining to operators how we see it, as one of the first. We are very keen to learn from other operators, who are bigger than us and have more complex technology problems that come along. Actually we are working together to make sure we share information and understanding to get the best out of the spectrum.

Second, as a forum chair, we must send the right messages to the rest of the industry about what we need to make of this spectrum and how this technology is successful in our countries. A number of us are going to pay a lot of money to governments to get this spectrum. We are going to then invest a lot in the equipment, and we are going to spend a lot of time explaining to customers why it is important to provide the service. So we really want to make sure the whole ecosystem and industry understand the dynamics of what we see, not only from the technology point of view, but also from the market and customers as well. We think that those things together will make the forum very powerful.

New positioning, new name

WinWin: How is Huawei helping Telecom New Zealand’s efforts to move from challenger to leader?

Havercroft: In New Zealand, we are number two, and we want to be number one. What Huawei has already helped us do is be able to show consistent level of service to customers. That’s been very important.

Being able to take a leadership on customer experience with the launch of 4G at 1800MHz is the next contribution from Huawei. Huawei has already helped us launch 1800MHz and 700MHz trials using their technology. That’s been great. What’s been really good is that this enables us to provide a clear and consistent level of service to customers. So that’s been a very powerful message. Technology has worked, has been robust, and it’s been very useful in the marketplace.

The second thing we are looking for is the next step of the roadmap and evolution of the technology. We are already seeing this with carrier aggregation, so we would like to work with Huawei to develop further on how carrier aggregation will improve the whole range of services for customers.

The third is what customers expect to see in terms of consistency. There is a commitment in terms of megabits per second over a percentage of time. So, if the network is consistently good all of the time, and if Huawei can help us with that, they will continue to maintain leadership.

WinWin: Telecom New Zealand is in the middle of a re-brand to the name Spark to focus on mobile, and other new digital revenue streams. Why make this move at this time?

Havercroft: The decision to rebrand our company was not taken lightly, as you can imagine. Telecom New Zealand has been around for 27 years as Telecom New Zealand. Before that, it was a government department. We think the brand is a little tired, and we certainly believe it no longer represents the services and technology. The brand is not what we want to do to help customers have a better life, in terms of enabling to connect with this strangely bizarre world where everybody wants to connect something instantaneously on any device anywhere. That really drove us to rethink what we want the company to be not just in term of the name, but how we talk to our customers and how we engage with customers. So, we can share with you how customers see the technology and how they talk about technology in their language, because very few customers will talk to you about carrier aggregation; they will talk about being able to download the latest YouTube video instantaneously on a bus. Perhaps changing our language could be a really powerful thing to do.