Chorus Just Doubled Your Fibre Speed — Here's What Changed

In June 2025, Chorus — the company that owns and operates most of New Zealand's fibre network — rolled out free speed upgrades across two of its most popular wholesale tiers.

Fibre 50 (50/10 Mbps) became Fibre 100 (100/20 Mbps). That's double the download speed and double the upload.

Fibre 300 (300/100 Mbps) became Fibre 500 (500/100 Mbps). A 67% jump in download speed with the same upload.

These weren't optional upgrades or promotional offers. Chorus changed the wholesale product specifications, meaning every ISP that resells these tiers passed the upgrade through to customers automatically.

Over 700,000 New Zealand homes and businesses received faster broadband as a result of these upgrades. If you were on a plan marketed as Fibre 50 or Fibre 300 from any ISP — Spark, Vodafone, 2degrees, Orcon, Slingshot, SpotOn, or anyone else — your connection was upgraded.

The upgrades applied to the Chorus fibre network specifically. If your fibre is provided by Enable (Christchurch), Tuatahi First Fibre (formerly Ultrafast Fibre, in Hamilton/Tauranga/other regions), or Northpower (Whangārei), similar upgrades were announced but timelines varied slightly by provider.

The short answer: data usage has exploded. Chorus reported that average monthly household data consumption hit 650GB — a 13x increase over the past decade. Streaming in 4K, cloud gaming, working from home, smart home devices — it all adds up.

The existing Fibre 50 tier was starting to feel genuinely constrained for modern households. Two people streaming simultaneously could saturate the 50 Mbps download, and the 10 Mbps upload was a bottleneck for anyone on video calls.

By lifting the floor to 100/20, Chorus ensured the baseline fibre experience remains fit for purpose. The Fibre 300 to 500 upgrade was partly about competitive positioning — keeping fibre attractive compared to 5G home broadband, which was starting to match Fibre 300 speeds in some areas.

In most cases, no. Your ISP should have applied the speed upgrade automatically. You don't need to call anyone, change your plan, or swap any hardware.

However, it's worth checking:

1. Run a speed test at speedtest.net or fast.com — are you actually seeing the higher speeds? 2. If you were on Fibre 50 and still see speeds around 50 Mbps, contact your ISP. Some smaller retailers were slower to implement the change. 3. Your router is unlikely to be the bottleneck — even older routers handle 100 Mbps without issue. But if you're on an ancient router (pre-2018), it could be limiting your Wi-Fi speeds even if the fibre connection is faster.

The upgrade is a wholesale network change, so there's no catch, no price increase, and no new contract required.

This is the question worth asking. The speed upgrades compressed the gap between tiers.

If you're on Fibre 500 (the old Fibre 300): You're now on the same tier that used to cost more. Check your monthly rate — if you're still paying a premium, you're getting genuinely good value at 500/100 Mbps. But if your household of 1–2 people was fine on the old Fibre 50, the new Fibre 100 might be all you need. Downgrading could save you $15–$25/month.

If you're on Fibre Max / 900: The gap between 500 Mbps and 900 Mbps is now smaller than the old gap between 300 and 900. For most households, Fibre 500 is now more than enough. Unless you have specific high-bandwidth needs (content creation, home servers, 6+ simultaneous heavy users), it might be time to reassess whether the top tier is worth the premium.

The free upgrades are great news — but they're also a prompt to review whether your current plan still makes sense for your actual usage.