Telco signs 10 year
renewable energy deal with Genesis

A 10 year deal
between Spark and Genesis Energy will see the telco buy all
the power generated by the Lauriston solar
plant.

Spark says this will make a significant
contribution towards its emissions reduction target. It aims
to cut Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 56 per cent when measured
against its 2020 level.

Construction work is about to
start at Lauriston. When the plant goes online at the end of
this year it has a planned output of 63MW. Spark says that
is around 60 per cent of its total energy
requirement.

For now Spark plans to get the rest of
its power from Genesis through the grid. The two companies
say they plan to explore further low or zero emission
opportunities as Spark aims to move to 100 per renewable
energy in the longer term.

Spark aims for
emissionless growth

Jolie Hodson, Spark’s CEO, says
she expects her company’s energy use to increase as it
invests more in data centres and 5G mobile
infrastructure.

She says the company has been
exploring how to decouple growth from emissions growth:
“It is important to us that we deliver on our
science-based target by supporting the generation of new
renewable energy.

“In doing so I believe we are
demonstrating how NZ Inc can work together to support
Aotearoa’s climate goals – with Spark’s procurement
supporting Genesis’s renewable energy investments, and
those investments in turn enabling Spark to meet its
emissions reduction targets.”

Hodson is the convenor
of the Climate Leaders Coalition, a group of New Zealand
business leaders who banded together for a collective
response to climate change.

One NZ tail wags for
Infratil’s dog

One New Zealand played a starring
role in Infratil’s 2024 financial results.

The telco
saw its proportionate EBITDAF, that’s earnings before
interest and taxation, depreciation and amortisation and
fair value adjustments, up 63 per cent on last
year.

Infratil says while most of the gain comes from
doubling its stake in One New Zealand during the year, it
would have still climbed 15 per cent without that
transaction.

Mobile growth

One NZ saw its
EBITDAF up 13.7 per cent at $600 million. It says much of
the growth came from mobile operations. One invested $70
million in building an additional 346 mobile sites during
the year and expanded its fibre network. It says it will
establish a separate fibre business during the current
financial year.

Other Infratil highlights include a 26
per cent EBITDAF increase for the CDC data centre business.
The year saw additional capacity added at sites in
Silverdale and Hobsonville, which a second data centre is
now being built at Hobsonville.

Infratil’s New
Zealand mobile
tower business, Fortysouth, which run the towers for One
NZ, added 48 new sites and upgraded 247 during the
year.

Greer takes chief customer
role at 2degrees

2degrees chief corporate affairs
officer Emma-Kate Greer has moved to take over the chief
customer officer role at the telco. Her job involves
overseeing the 700 employees in the company’s customer
operations. It also means taking control of 54 retail
stores, along with channels and customer
support.

Greer will be known to many in the industry
following from her time at Telecom, now Spark. She has also
worked for Genesis and TVNZ.

She will replace Taryn
Hamilton who has moved on after 10 yers with the
company.

Crown
Infrastructure Partners says more rural upgrades to come
despite reaching the target

Crown Infrastructure
Partners’ Quarterly Connectivity Update reports that, a
startlingly precise 84,104 rural households and businesses
now have access to improved broadband.

CIP says that
while this figure represents 100 per cent of the figure that
was originally targeted by the Rural Broadband Programme, it
doesn’t mean the project is over. It says “There are a
number of contracts that are yet to conclude”. In other
words, it appears the programme is set to go past its
target.

Other highlights from the update include a
further 66km of State Highways covered during the first
three months of the year. This brings the total to 1,471km.
The project to provide coverage at tourism spots is not 85
per cent complete with 10 additional spots covered during
the quarter.

Reseller News: Local fibre network
operators seek to go ‘beyond fibre’

Rob O’Neill
turned in a 700 word story looking at the future facing the
local fibre companies. He writes:

“A discussion
document released by the the Ministry of Business,
Innovation and Employment (MBIE) earlier this month said
with the completion of phases one and two of the of the
Ultrafast Broadband project, LFCs had raised questions about
their role in telecommunications markets and restrictions in
their constitutions.

“The LFCs are Enable, Tuatahi
First Fibre and Northpower Fibre, all of which have rolled
fibre out within specified geographic areas while Chorus did
the same for the rest of the country.

“Where Chorus
was regulated, the LFCs were restricted in their activities,
such as providing retail services, through their
constitutions.

“We understand the other LFCs
consider that the settings in their constitutions are too
restrictive and prevent them from expanding their networks
and developing services for consumers (which could
contribute to addressing existing connectivity challenges,
including in rural areas),” the discussion document
said.

What’s clear is the competitive landscape has
altered since the rules were established at the start of the
UFB fibre build some 15 years ago. At that time fibre looked
like it could be a monopoly.

Today those rules look
too restrictive, but it’s an area where government
decision makers and regulators tend to move slowly,
especially so when compared to the pace of change in the
wider communications market.

In other
news…

Brennan Doherty, writing for the BBC website,
says: People
want dumb phones. Apparently handsets with fewer
features are hard to find and phone makers simply aren’t
interested in serving customers who prefer to do less with
their mobiles.

You sometimes hear these devices
referred to as ‘feature phones’. That is ridiculous. The
whole point of the hardware is their lack of
features.

Another ridiculous idea is that the new
Arm-powered, AI-enabled Windows laptops that hit the streets
this week pose a
direct challenge to Apple.

Almost no-one decides
between Windows and MacOS because of the processor inside
the computer. If they did, Apple would have dominated
hardware dales for the past three years with its processors
massively outgunning the CPUs in Windows laptops. See also:
The bigger story as
Microsoft introduces Copilot+ PCs.

NZ Compare
thinks New
Zealanders pay too much for broadband. It’s certainly
true that local prices don’t compare favourably with other
markets. If there are problems, they are structural. New
Zealand lacks scale and has a widely dispersed population.
There’s also a counter argument that our service providers
and wholesalers are not making huge profits. If you are
signed up for the newsletter you can comment on this
below.

Elsewhere on my site: One
month with the Apple MacBook Air M3.

At Interest,
Juha Saarinen says Starlink
has demonstrated a video call directly to a standard mobile
phone. It looks like the satellite network will be ready
for One New Zealand’s planned launch of
text services later this year. There’s no indication of
pricing yet.

At the ITP Tech Blog Peter Griffin’s The
stark contrast between Aussie’s innovation-heavy budget
and our own makes a valid point. He says he admires that
country’s chutzpah when it comes to its huge investment in
quantum computing. One aspect of the story not covered is
the Australian government’s long term success rate when
placing bets on technology. Not every past investment has
paid off.

It’s behind the paywall, but at
BusinessDesk, Ben Moore writes about Dawn
Aerospace. The business, co-founded by Kiwis Stefan
and James Powell, promises a
greener approach to putting satellites in
orbit.

Things are far from happy at Christchurch
City Council’s holdings company, CCHL, which controls the
Enable Services fibre business. At
Newsroom, David Williams picks
apart the rows which resulted in the sudden resignation of
four board members.

The Download Weekly is
supported by Chorus New
Zealand.

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