The roll-out of UnisonFibre's fibre network has produced nearly 40 new jobs, says sales and marketing manager Wayne Baird.
Thirty of the new jobs were in the Unison Group (22 in Hawke's Bay) and six within retail internet providers.
"This is a huge leap forward for our community and we
believe employment growth in the region will only increase over the coming months as we continue to build throughout the Bay," he said.
"We have also attracted new start-up companies to the region, with retail service provider VIP setting up in Napier as a cloud/virtualisation provider."
The latest stage of the fibre build started last week in Hastings and Onekawa, and Mr Baird said UnisonFibre planned to have the majority of the business community, schools and health providers connected to the fibre network over the next 12 months. Connection was free for organisations.
Hawke's Bay Chamber of Commerce chief executive officer Murray Douglas said fibre was in the new Business Hawke's Bay centre and e-commerce facilities should be up and running within three weeks. The chamber planned to go completely cloud-based for all its computing (where all applications and information are stored remotely and accessed through the internet), after a successful trial using accounting software Xero.
"We would never go back," Mr Douglas said.
UnisonFibre has installed over 140km of fibre in Hastings, Napier and Havelock North, and locals have been registering their interest at getonit.co.nz
Fibre is also being rolled out in Taupo and Rotorua.
