The first roadside cabinet designed to boost broadband performance in Queenstown has been installed in Fernhill Rd and will go online on Tuesday.
About 300 customers within 2km of a new cabinet should be able to connect at faster ADSL2+ broadband speeds, depending on their broadband plan, modem, computer and the wiring in their home or business.
Another 15 cabinets will be turned on in stages by the end of this year.
Chorus, Telecom's new network access business, is installing about 3600 Whisper cabinets and adding 2500km of fibre-optic cable to Telecom's existing 20,000km fibre network.
The work is expected to deliver faster broadband to towns with 500 lines or more by 2012.
Customers who lived near a telephone exchange would continue to have their broadband service delivered from there.
Fernhill Rd was chosen because of its distance from the resort's existing exchanges, near the Queenstown District Court and Mobil service station.
It was the logical place to start, Chorus fibre-to-the-node programme manager Ed Beattie said.
Wanaka would have eight additional cabinets installed in April 2011 and a further seven in July that year.
Each cabinet cost $150,000 and space would be provided for other access providers, such as Vodaphone and Telstra Clear, which are considering cabinets in other districts.
Designed and manufactured in Christchurch, cabinets were coated in silicon paint to easily remove graffiti.
Each features a battery back-up power supply in addition to a generator connection in case of power cuts. An additional 9.3km of fibre-optic cable was to be added to the 430km already in the Queenstown Lakes district.
About 3.5km of the new cable would need new trenching and would be established along Gorge Rd and into the central business district.
