Powering to super-quick net

Calix senior director of corporate marketing Geoff Burke (left), Northpower public affairs manager Steve Macmillan and Calix senior vice-president sales and marketing John Colvin.

Business owners in Whangarei's central city are being encouraged to connect to Northpower Fibre's award-winning broadband network.

Northpower say the fastest broadband speeds in Northland are now available to more than 600 businesses, with download speeds of 50Mbps and upload speeds of 20Mbps. The 50/20Mbps package is available from numerous retail service providers on the Northpower Fibre network.

The announcement comes days after Northpower was presented with a major international broadband award, the 2013 Calix Innovation Award for "Fibre Transformation", at a ceremony in Las Vegas, America.

The director of Whangarei business Plus Chartered Accountants Brent Martin said businesses not on fibre broadband were missing a great opportunity for growth.

"It saves an immense amount of time because staff are not waiting for pages to open like when we had a copper connection.

"It has also allowed us to operate in the cloud and make cloud services available for clients to log into. Anyone serious about growing their business and improving profitability would be foolish not to be on fibre broadband," Mr Martin said.

Northpower's network general manager Graham Dawson said the fibre network was a game-changer for Whangarei.

He said the Northpower Fibre CBD build was the most complex and time-consuming part of the Whangarei UFB build, taking just over a year.

"We currently have the highest customer connection rate of any UFB build in New Zealand and I believe that will continue to increase once our network is completed in April because our fibre specialists will then be able to focus solely on customer connections instead of the physical infrastructure construction," Mr Dawson said.

Public affairs manager Steve MacMillan, who was in Las Vegas to collect the award, said the honour was a timely reminder of just how advanced Northpower was in the fibre communications field and what a great resource people in Whangarei had access to.

More than 17,000 people can connect to the Northpower Fibre network now and the firm says more than 1000 of them have already done so.