About Chorus NZ - Who are they and what do they do

Chorus Story

It started with the first ‘talking telegraph’ trial in 1877 which led to the formation of the New Zealand Post and Telegraph Department in 1881. What followed was 130 years of communications evolution that saw telephones in nearly every home, the privatisation of the network and birth of Telecom in 1987, and the arrival of the internet and mobile phone technology.

Now optical fibre ushers in a new era. Chorus was formed in March 2008 as a Telecom business unit operating at arm’s length from the rest of the organisation, to give all service providers access to the local fixed line network.

In December 2011, Chorus reached a major milestone, formally becoming a separate entity and listing on the New Zealand stock exchange.

Today, as New Zealand’s largest telecommunications infrastructure company, Chorus continues its long heritage of building and looking after the country’s fixed line telecommunications network for present and future generations.

What does Chorus do?

Chorus is New Zealand’s largest telecommunications infrastructure company. Chorus maintain and build a network predominantly made up of local telephone exchanges, cabinets and copper and fibre cables. Approximately 1.8 million lines are connected to homes and businesses throughout the country.

Chorus operate an open access network working with many different phone and broadband providers to give access to our network and develop innovative new products and services. Their team helps these providers connect their home and business customers to the world.

You’ll see the 2,000 Chorus field technicians out and about. They’re working on their behalf to make about one million visits to New Zealand homes and businesses each year, maintaining and repairing existing phone and broadband lines – and installing new ones.

Right now, Chorus is laying 20,000km of fibre optic cable and ducting to make Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) available to rural communities and more than 830,000 homes and businesses across New Zealand. They work with Crown Fibre Holdings to identify priority users and to establish the eight-year deployment rollout.

Fibre can deliver large amounts of data further and faster to support services like broadband television and high definition video conferencing compared with the copper cables traditionally used for telecommunications services.

The future of telecommunications is exciting and Chorus is working hard to make it happen.