Mark Aue: Chorus NZ CEO on making the infrastructure priority list

Broadband company Chorus is celebrating an endorsement from the Infrastructure Commission for its planed extension.

Chorus seeks to extend its ultrafast broadband network to another 160,000 homes and businesses at a cost of between $2.5 billion and $3 billion.

Chorus CEO Mark Aue says now is the time to boost New Zealand's rural communities. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
We had the BEG Infrastructure Commission report Land today. It
announced seventeen projects that at once treated as national priorities.
The bulk of those projects are being run by the
public sector, but one private company has managed to get
on the list too. In that company is Chorus Mark, Owa.
Is the CEO hey Mark City head. Now, the recommendation
here is that you should be able to expand the
fiber broadband from eighty seven percent coverage of the country

(00:38):
to ninety five percent. That eight percent difference where is
that in the country.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
It's all over the country heather from the top of
the north to the bottom of the south. So it'll
pick up another four hundred thousand New Zealand businesses and
homes and probably across a thousand communities.

Speaker 4 (00:54):
To say, why haven't they got it already, Well, we've
done the original UFB deployment, that is, you know what
has kicked off over the last decade or so, and
that's now expanded fiber access across eighty seven percent of the.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Population of where we all live, work and play. But
this is now a time to develop a rural connectivity strategy.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Okay, now is it like anything else? The start of
it is the cheapest bit, and the further along you go,
the more expensive it gets.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
Pretty much, and so the further you go out from
urban the more the costs grow exponentially.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Do you think we need to get to one hundred percent?
And can we even?

Speaker 3 (01:31):
I think ninety five percent, based on the assessments we've done,
is a pretty good use case, and we can see
material economic and productivity benefit to come back from that
roughly in order of seventeen billion dollars over the next
ten years. I think the reality beyond ninety five percent,
the economics are hard to stack up, just because of
New Zealand land mass and where we all live on

(01:53):
a distributed basis.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
So if the government backed it today, how long would
it take you to get to ninety five.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Look, realistically, it's probably over five to ten years as
a program, But I think the benefit is we could
be up and running shove already in the next few month.
So you know, we're not testing theory here that we've
done this before very successfully, and I think that's part
of the endorsement of course, we've got a good track
record of doing this.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
I love that. I love that you sounded apologetic for
five to ten years. I mean, you realize five to
ten years is the blink of an eye when it
comes to infrastructure projects in this country, given how long
we wait for anything to be built, right, it's pretty quick.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
Well, it is. But I think we believe in fiber
as a gold standard, and actually we want to play
a role in bridging that digital divide. And you're actually
seeing more and more core infrastructure come out of the
regions and rural communities, and putting digital infrastructure like fiber
in is a way to actually enable those other sectors.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Look, this seems to me a no brainer, right that
in twenty twenty five, in a digital world, given how
much connectivity there is, how much business is now relyan
on this, it seems a complete no brainer that we
have to get it to at least this level. Do
we actually need a report to tell us.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
Oh, look, it's a great question. I think what we
take out of the endorsement out of the Infrastructure Commission
today is that there's a recognition that rural connectivity is
a priority problem. But at the same time, there's an
opportunity and we've got solutions here that we can move through.
And again, as I say, we're not testing theory. We've
actually seen the benefits and the ability that's fiber brains.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
But Mark, this is a no brainer.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
You know what, I know what.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
Anybody listening to this right now knows it. So do
you think without a report like this a government would
drag its heels.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
Look, I'm hoping not. And of course we'll say it's
a no brainer, but there's a lot of people out
there probably take a cynical view that. Of course, for
it is going to say that fiber is great. But
I think by any standard, in any report, including our
own Commerce Commission, would recognize that the gold standard and
broadband technology is fiber.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Listen, Mark, I really appreciate your time. Thank you for
talking to us. As Mark Oware, whose Chorus is chief executive.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
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