While Australians wait for a copper network “upgrade” that can't be guaranteed to deliver better than 25 Mbps, a speed war has broken out across the Tasman, with residential gigabit plans arriving at wholesale prices that could see households pay under $NZ100 per month.

The wholesaler has announced the offering is now available to its retail customers, with coverage in all the centres in which it's building its network – Hamilton, Tauranga, Te Awamutu, Cambridge, Tokoroa, New Plymouth, Wanganui and Hawera.

In its canned statement, the company says the gigabit service will wholesale at $NZ65 per month, and Ultrafast Fibre says it will stay on the product list until 2020.

The company says residential demand lay behind the decision to create the wholesale offering, along with a wish to slap down the idea that “copper is good enough for now”, according to its CEO Maxine Elliott.

The announcement is also an attempt to leapfrog Chorus, which is running a Twitter competition to set the location of the first residential gigabit trials, using the #Gigatown hashtag.

Ultrafast Fibre also says it will bring 100 / 20 Mbps and 200 / 20 Mbps wholesale offerings to market in July, with 100 Mbps wholesaling at $NZ45 per month and 200 Mbps at $NZ55 per month.

Elliot nominated “multi-use gaming, major data transfer, and high-definition video” as applications that would make the high speed services attractive, noting that households running multiple video streams at once are “now a reality”.

A reality in New Zealand, perhaps. ®