Unison Fibre, the Counties Power equivalent in the Hawkes Bay, has announced a commercial arrangement to deliver ultra-fast fibre-optic broadband services to Hawke’s Bay, Rotorua and Taupo.

The key thing about this announcement is that Unison Fibre is "...now connecting businesses, schools and local authorities" across its three network regions in Hawke’s Bay, Taupo and Rotorua.  The work has been in progress for 12 months and precedes the government's UFB program.  That is, the high speed broadband roll-out stands on its own as a commercially viable project and is being done without government funding.

Rural Connect has previously argued that, as in Australia (and now the Hawkes Bay), urban fibre projects are capable of giving a business return on investment without government monies and hence the UFB funds could and should be re-allocated to demand-side issues and to rural broadband provisioning.  Read the full article here...