Nokia announced that it has renewed the managed services agreement originally signed in 2014 with Chorus of New Zealand, the country’s largest telecommunications infrastructure company that serves around 1.7 million fixed lines, including 1.2 million broadband connections, for a further three years.
Under the renewed contract, Nokia will continue to provide longstanding customer Chorus with fully managed end-to-end operations services to help enhance the services delivered to customers, as well as improve operational efficiency and quality of the national fixed line network. Chorus will also leverage Nokia’s technical capabilities and global services expertise.
The agreement specifically encompasses managed services provision including end-to-end operations and network management utilising Nokia’s global delivery centre in India, and real-time service management based on performance data and proactive correlation of network events to help prevent faults and improve network availability, as well as to reduce the number of incidents.
In June of last year, Nokia announced an agreement with Chorus for a three-year extension of their technology partnership to support the continued roll-out of the ultra high speed broadband program in New Zealand. As part of the deal Nokia was to deploy broadband access, including GPON and VDSL2 technology, IP routing and optical transport solutions. The agreement included Nokia’s 7330 ISAM FTTN access node, 7360 ISAM FX fibre platform and 7367 ISAM SX-16 VDSL2 micro-node.
Additionally, to expand Chorus’ backbone network capacity across the North and South Islands, Nokia was to deliver its 7750 Service Router, 7950 Extensible Routing System (XRS) routing technology, 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS), and 5620 Service Aware Manager.
Recently, Chorus reported results for the six months ended December 31, 2016, noting that during the period it had upgraded nearly 100 rural broadband cabinets with fibre optic and VDSL, improving broadband service for around 7,000 mostly rural customers, while in urban areas it had reached a total of 681,000 customers with its fibre-based UFB network, meaning the UFB build was around 61% complete.
In January 2017, Chorus announced an agreement with the government to extend the UFB network to a further 169 areas to make fibre broadband available to a further 200,000 homes and businesses in addition to the 1.1 million customers in the existing UFB program areas.
