Sporting Sevens helps set booming Wellington Wi-Fi traffic figures

Despite a well-documented public desertion, the Rugby Sevens and the January sporting calendar of 2015 has helped generate record Wi-Fi traffic in Wellington.

According to wholesale Wi-Fi provider CityLink, during the last six months Wi-Fi usage has increased 100% to 350,000 hours per month (almost 40 years per month) while users have increased 25% to 125,000 and uploaded traffic has tripled over the same period.

“Sporting events like Rugby Sevens, Cricket ODIs and the fine summer of 2015 have been great facilitators to the up-surge of Wi-Fi traffic,” says Nick Willis, CEO, CityLink.

“CityLink has also launched a new WiFi platform on cbdfree. The new platform offers unlimited data sessions without interruptions from login or splash pages.

“Users can now continuously update emails, music, photos and applications like Facebook and Twitter without taking their phone out of their pocket.”

CityLink runs a number of Wi-Fi networks in Wellington including New Zealand’s most used public Wi-Fi, cbdfree.

Supported by the Wellington City Council and set up in 2011 during the Rugby World Cup, cbdfree is a prominent feature of the Wellington landscape covering the Golden Mile and beyond.

“The new platform has a very user friendly advertising format too which users do not find intrusive and advertisers have shown significant interest in,” Willis adds.

“95% of users surveyed expressed their satisfaction with the platform. The inline advertising platform is a banner ad which generates multiple impressions during each Wi-Fi session, which is what advertisers prefer.”

Willis says the cbdfree Wi-Fi stats show significant spikes during the cricket ODIs and the Rugby Sevens at the Westpac stadium.

“cbdfree could be a gold mine for advertisers, who can run special promotions to stadium audiences to generate higher offtake,” he adds.

“We are in touch with advertisers and media companies for the ICC Cricket World Cup and other upcoming events in 2015.”

Established in 1995, CityLink is a New Zealand supplier of open access wholesale telecommunications services and a wholly owned subsidiary of the NZX publicly listed TeamTalk group of companies.