​Christchurch UFB enabled as network build reaches 92,000 homes and businesses

Enable Services Limited (ESL) has delivered on plans to accelerate the roll-out of fibre broadband in greater Christchurch in the 2015 Financial Year (FY2015).

According to the telco firm, this was the “highlight of a successful year” in ESL’s roles as a major investor in providing fibre broadband to the local community and as the company contracted to build and operate this new network.

ESL completed a network build programme covering over 27,000 premises in FY2015 - compared to the previous year’s build programme of 18,500 premises.

As a result, this meant 86,500 local homes and businesses could connect - growth of 30,000 since last year - and this has grown in the first quarter of FY2016 to over 92,000, just over 50 percent complete.

“2015 was a very successful year for ESL and Enable Networks Limited (Enable) when it comes to making fibre broadband available to homes and businesses in our community,” says Mark Bowman, Chair, ESL.

“Our deployment programme was significantly greater than last year’s programme and we have committed to increasing our deployment rate by another 10 plus percent in FY2016.

“This means we will have passed approximately 120,000 homes and businesses by mid-2016, leaving 60,000 to reach.

“We are very much on target to complete the network deployment by 31 December 2018 - as announced last year.”

Bowman says ESL also reported that total connections to Enable’s fibre broadband network had increased by 175 percent to 12,295 at year end - 17 percent ahead of expectations.

“This is dramatic connection growth throughout the year and, again, it has continued into FY2016,” Bowman adds.

“Today, ESL is connecting more than 1,000 new customers to Enable’s network each month - or 50 every day.

“This is expected to grow to about 80 to 90 connections a day in the coming months - meaning Enable could have nearly 30,000 customers connected at year end, more than double in one year.

“The results in deployment and connections were ahead of our business plan and our Statement of Intent targets provided to Christchurch City Holdings Limited. This means FY2015 was a very successful year for ESL.”

Bowman says ESL’s FY2015 financial performance continues to reflect this dual role in the delivery of fibre broadband to greater Christchurch.

Also, revenue growth was ahead of target - with an increase by $10.6m to $74.4m in the year - which is in-line with it building more network and connecting more customers for Enable than expected.

ESL’s net loss increased - as it has year-on-year since the fibre broadband roll-out began - to $10.0m in FY2015.

“Increases in net loss early in our long-term investment in fibre broadband are expected, before these begin to taper,” Bowman adds.

“We are targeting moving to a NPAT positive position in the next five years.”