Orcon continues to unbundle, welcomes competition

News release LLU - 1
6 June 2008

Orcon® continues to unbundle and welcomes more competition

Orcon, New Zealand’s first ISP to unbundle the local loop, today welcomed Vodafone’s announcement that it would join the LLU club, offering even more competition to the New Zealand broadband market.

“In the past two-and-a-half months we have unbundled more than a dozen exchanges across Auckland, offering high-speed, next-generation broadband and telephone service,” says Orcon Chief Executive Scott Bartlett.

“Orcon’s customers are early adopters so obviously we have been keen to provide them with all the services we can offer as a result of unbundling – and fast.”

Orcon’s unbundled telephone and ADSL2+ broadband service, called Orcon@home+, was initially launched to customers via five Auckland exchanges in March. Since then Orcon has installed its equipment in more exchanges, with more than 30 more due by the end of 2008.

The company aims to bring unbundling to Wellington in the fourth quarter of this year and to Christchurch in 2009. Orcon is focusing on major metropolitan areas because the majority of its existing customers are in those areas.

Orcon was the first telecommunications provider to introduce new phone and internet plans following the Government’s decision in late 2006 to ‘unbundle’ the local loop, the copper wires that link homes to their neighbourhood exchanges.

Chief Executive Scott Bartlett says customers on unbundled lines are seeing greatly enhanced broadband performance, with customers getting an average of 10 megabits/second on the network. Or put another way, they can download a song from iTunes in less than ten seconds, and movie in less than 30 minutes.

Orcon’s new unbundled ADSL2+ service has the potential to deliver speeds of up to 24 megabits per second (Mbps) downstream and up to 1 Mbps upstream, roughly tripling the downstream bandwidth capacity of standard ADSL. ADSL is the common existing broadband standard in New Zealand.

There is no minimum contract period with subscribers billed monthly and Orcon says its customers are capable of saving hundreds of dollars a year.

ENDS

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