[News] Spark Joins Dunedin's Gigatown Party

Spark today announced it will offer Unlimited gigabit-broadband plans from $99 a month to customers in #gigatowndun (also known as Dunedin) next year. As an extra bonus for winning the Gigatown competition, the technology company will also be installing GigaWiFi on ten of the busiest Spark WiFi hotspots around the city.

Spark Home, Mobile and Business Chief Executive Chris Quin said gigabit speeds over the fibre network would deliver enormous benefits to Dunedin – enhancing educational and business opportunities, as well as allowing people to do more online in their day-to-day lives.

“Our customers love the ultra-fast speeds they’re already getting on our fibre plans, and now with our Gigatown plans we’ll be able to bring locals in Dunedin speeds around ten times faster than those available to most parts of New Zealand.
Fast fibre connections make a huge difference to our home broadband customers, allowing people to seamlessly watch online-TV services like Lightbox and use data-heavy apps like video-calling and video streaming.
When it comes to education and agriculture, two very important industries for the Otago region, a fast internet connection is even more important – and in fact can be transformative.”

Early on in the Gigatown campaign Spark committed to installing GigaWiFi on some of the WiFi hotspots the company already has in the winning centre. Around New Zealand, Spark has retrofitted its phoneboxes to be WiFi zones – allowing people to connect to the net without chewing through their mobile data allowances.

GigaWiFi involves Spark installing next-generation super high speed (up to 1 gigabit per second speeds) WiFi hotspots on ten selected phone boxes around Dunedin.

The above claim is technically incorrect as users will not be seeing real life speeds of anywhere near 1 gigabit per second. This is sorta misleading as users on these gigabit-enabled access points in Dunedin will now be expecting very-near-gigabit speeds if not the full gigabit (which we know is impossible in a situation like this) speed. Spark have claimed that they will be using these gigabit-enabled access points, however when you calculate in the technical specifications, users should expect to see speeds of around 2-300 mbps actually.

Chris Quin said:

“From next year, Dunedin will have some of the fastest commercially available public WiFi in the Southern Hemisphere – and most Spark customers will be able to access 1GB of WiFi data a day for free. Dunedin is a deserved winner of the Gigatown competition and we hope GigaWiFi will be the icing on the cake.”

Mr Quin said Spark is working with the Dunedin City Council to identify which WiFi hotspots would be “gigafied” during the coming months.

More information on Spark’s gigabit broadband plans may be found at www.spark.co.nz/gigatown

[News] Spark Joins Dunedin’s Gigatown Party

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