The Commerce Commission has completed the third quarter of its monitoring of uptake of residential broadband services provided or supported by Telecom New Zealand Limited.

The Commission commenced its broadband monitoring following Telecom's announcement last year that it will have no fewer than 250,000 residential broadband connections (minimum 256 kbps downstream and 128 kbps upstream) by the end of 2005, of which more than a third (approximately 83,000) will be wholesale Jetstream or bitstream products.

As at the end of March 2005, Telecom had achieved 68 percent of the connection target with a total of 169,937 residential broadband connections. Of this number, 17,933 were wholesale connections, representing 21.6 percent of the wholesale target.

Statistics on Telecom's New Zealand Residential Retail and Wholesale connections are available in the attached Word document.