Thomas Salmen from Orcon is talking about collaboration in a fibre world – here at the Working in Collaborative Environments conference in Auckland. Thomas is the CTO at Orcon, and was recently announced as the 2012 New Zealand CIO at the annual NZ CIO Summit.

Key points:
– Orcon has a large investment in current broadband networks in New Zealand based on copper, and is investing in next-generation networks, eg., fibre to the home.
– There is a very low awareness of UFB (ultra-fast broadband) and fibre in New Zealand.
– Fibre to the premise is very different to what’s available today. The programme runs from 2012 to 2019. There are about 100,000 premises that have fibre available today. By 2019, the program will aim to reach 900,000 premises (75% of the population).
– The network is being built by Chorus, Northpower, UltraFast Fibre, and Enable Networks.
– If you want fibre (and the network reaches you), you need to deal with a retail service provider.
– What do you use fibre for?
– … a huge range of network/cloud-based services – Jive, Office 365, Microsoft Lync, Yammer, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
– … TelePresence from Cisco and others.