As the Government inches ahead with its $1.5 billion fibre-to-the-premises plans, the issue is going to become what to do with all that internet bandwidth.

The long-awaited details of the Government's UFB (ultra-fast broadband) initiative were released last week. By late next month a Crown-owned company, Crown Fibre Holdings, will be set up to oversee the work of local fibre companies (LFCs) in building optical fibre networks that will reach 75 per cent of the population within 10 years.

Priority in the first six years will be given to business, schools, health services and new developments.

"Ultra-fast" means 100 megabits a second (Mbit/s) downstream and 50Mbit/s up. And what's more, the connections will be upgradable to be 10 times faster - 1Gbit/s downloads.

That's a lot of bandwidth - much more than is needed by any existing application in use by residential internet subscribers. What, then, will we use it for?

For a start, the Government's $1.5 billion won't cover the cost of connecting premises to the local fibre networks.

The LFCs, in fact, will merely own and operate the fibre; service providers will have to come up with end-user offerings, including the equipment and charges for connecting to the fibre.

There is little precedent for this kind of service in New Zealand.

However, John Nixon, an Auckland consultant, has some experience of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) projects near Taupo and north of Auckland.

Nixon was involved with Kensington Properties developments at Huka Village and Orewa, where it was intended to provide FTTH connections to hundreds of new dwellings. That came to grief when the developer went belly-up a year ago.

The services possible using the UFB initiative's promised bandwidth are unclear at this stage, according to Nixon.

"You don't need it today to send email and do a bit of web browsing ... but there will be unimagined new services available through fast connections and you'll be at a huge disadvantage if you don't have access to it.

"I'm talking about health care and access to government databases and things like that."

Nixon says fibre connections direct to homes, businesses and institutions open the way for direct access to government servers, with the ability to do electronically much of what still requires face-to-face interaction with State agencies.