You're listening to a share these podcast No. Today, New Zealand ranks seventeenth in the world for fiber uptake, which is quite an amazing stat for a country with five million people. And again the topography that we have to actually build this network, but we've got to stay at the forefront of that. Those visionaries put us out there when other countries and markets really weren't looking at this.
You know, that same ranking if you compare that to Australia are at fifty fifth, the UK at sixty six. So it's nice to be on the right side of those for a change, But expansions one digital equities another, so ensuring that no one's really left behind from this digital world. Today, the government statistics which would estimate one in five people across our set or are actually digitally excluded,
which is roughly about ten percent of households. That seems like a staggering statistic, particularly when you consider that we're increasingly becoming more digitized, so services like core government or retail services or access to health services that are becoming increasingly digitized. So the risk to being digitally excluded is probably is growing. If anything. In space, I was thinking a bit about you know, with boardband, we do, we continually expect more for less. What are some of the
other drivers that can help. Having access to high speed fiber connectivity has fundamentally changed the way that we all live, learn, work and play. And we saw that even more so during the pandemic for COVID and being at home heavily restricted but still actually being able to work and live and order takeaways and get them dropped at your door.
But it's fundamentally changed the way that we live. So, you know, even though it might seem like we're providing the same sort of service as we were back when Coorus first started with the UFB initiative, it's fundamentally changed. You know. To give you another statistic, ten years ago, even the average data usage in New Zealand per month was forty gigabits gigabytes sorry, it's now over six hundred gigabytes. We now do the annual usage from ten years ago
in just over two weeks. And again I'd say that's that's a pump for the fiber network because that shows again how scalable it actually is and it's built for that future again, so you know, it's it's something that when you look at the use cases of where that that might grow. Yes, the rate of growth might change and loss of late, but I don't think it's ever
coming down. So and you think about where some of that growth might be, because that speaks to the industry, you know, as terrestrial TV increasingly and most likely comes to an IP solution as we get to four K
mass market. And what I mean by that is, you know, even though four K has been around for a while, not every household has four K devices, and not every household is actually consuming four K content At the moment we have I think on average about I think the average is now twenty six devices connected in our home, which seems crazy, but if you actually add them up and you think about the laptops, the iPads, the wearables and watches, the TV, the smart fridge, disordering your milk
for next week, the security, you all your other appliance, it's really not hard to get to twenty six and that's only fore casts to grow even over the next five years to up to over forty devices. So there is growth and scalability in the fiber network. Investing and involves the risk you might lose the money when you start with we recommend talking to a licensed financial advisor. We also recommend reading product disclosure documents before deciding to invest.
Everything you're about to see and hear is current at the time of recording.