In 2017, Crown Infrastructure Partners (CIP) assessed that 90,000 rural households and businesses cannot access broadband speeds of at least 20 Mbps download. The RBI2 programme aims to reduce this number as much as possible.

RBI2 seeks to provide fast broadband to the greatest number of under-served rural homes and businesses within the funding available, and contribute towards achieving similar rates of access to fast broadband by rural end users across all regions of New Zealand

CIP has contracted to provide enhanced broadband for approximately 84,000 of these 90,000 households and businesses (including some commercial coverage from mobile operators) commencing deployment in 2018 and will be substantially complete by 2022.

CIP is partnering with the Rural Connectivity Group (RCG) (a joint venture between Spark, Vodafone and 2 degrees) to provide RBI2 coverage.

Alongside this, CIP is partnering with nine regional Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs):