Spark NZ’s future with Renee Mateparae

Episode Transcript (computer-generated)

Paul Spain:
Hey, folks, greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain. And great to have Renee Mateparae from Spark NZ joining us again. How are you, Renee?

Renee Mateparae:
Hi, Paul. I’m good. Thank you for having me. Great to be back.

Paul Spain:
Great to have you back. Lots to talk about today. There’s always lots going on in the tech world and very keen to delve into the future of Spark and all the interesting things and whatnot that are coming up. Yeah, really looking forward to that. Before we jump in, of course, a big thank you to our fantastic show partners who keep us on the air. So that includes spark. Thank you. Also One NZ 2degrees, HP and Gorilla Technology.

Paul Spain:
So delving into some of the New Zealand news to start with was an Auckland tradie and the headline was sort of highlighting that they’d clocked up $500 in parking fines just from loading tools in and out of a van. And there were sort of some complications due to the time that they were visiting a work address. And to me, this is sort of one of those areas where technology really helps us with things like facial recognition and number plate recognition when it comes to, from a policing perspective. But there is a kind of flip side to that coin and I, you know, I think this tradie’s not going to be feeling that, you know, that pleased with, with some of this technology. And, you know, I guess when you think about it, if there was. Yeah, if we sort of think of, well, you know, when things like parking fines and you know, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the varying fines around, those sorts of things, when it, you know, when it’s done by a human, look, you’re going to get, you’re going to get caught out if you do things on a, on a regular basis at some point. But when you, you move to there being, say, a camera in a particular place and the technology that runs 24.

Renee Mateparae:
7, 100% of the time, it’s like.

Paul Spain:
100% of the time. And I guess sort of a. And this could be, you know, could be adjusted from a technological sort of point. But, you know, if, let’s say there were a parking warden and you’d sort of duck in very quickly and leave again, you know, there’s a little bit of judgment, but when you hand it over to a bot that follows very kind of black and white rules, there isn’t any kind of reasonableness or sort of flexibility.

Renee Mateparae:
In a lot of cases, I think the AI tools particularly, you almost have to give them A chance to bed down so you can build the behavioral aspect into it so that you make sure that it kind of covers some of those edge use cases which you might not have thought of when you were setting up the rules. But yeah, it wouldn’t have been a nice find to come back to clocking up 500 bucks.

Paul Spain:
Yes. Yeah. When you know a few, few stops in the same location before you know there’s an issue and suddenly you’ve got half a dozen parking fines. Yust.

Renee Mateparae:
Yes. I think it’s always finding that balance. Right. Of how do you use AI and tools. I think the value video analytics and stuff that they’re putting into AI has got some amazing use cases, but you’ve just got to find that balance of not going too far the other way.

Paul Spain:
Yes. There’s an empathy element that sometimes in the tech world we forget about.

Renee Mateparae:
Yes. We’ve got to work out how to program that in right now.

Paul Spain:
This has sort of been coming for a while, but it has landed in, I think last few weeks as banks introducing their, what’s called confirmation of payee into I guess our banking apps for making payments. Now what this does is really designed to make sure that you’re paying who you think you’re paying. So there’s that verification step.

Renee Mateparae:
So it just adds an extra step into the process. Right.

Paul Spain:
So when you, when you’re setting up a new payee, so anyone that’s existing, if you’ve, you know, let’s say you’re a business and you’ve got, you know, thousands of staff that you pay, as would be the case for an organization like Spark, you know, you’re not having to go through and redo all of those or for a smaller business or, you know, individual who, you know, pays a few, you know, bills online, those existing ones, you know, they’re considered trusted. You’ve used them in the past, but yeah, with the new ones, you’ve got to, you know, put in the name of the person or the business, match the name and number and I think, yeah, largely that’s got to, that’s got to match up. So interestingly though, you know, chatting to someone within the banking sector, they were like, well, this makes us look good from a banking perspective. But actually in terms of the impact, quite a small percentage, Maybe, maybe around 1% of this type of fraud is going to be addressed by that. And I guess, you know, if we look at some of the scams where, you know, it can be a New Zealand person or business who’s paying funds to say an offshore party, these sort of invoice type scans and so on. Of course this relates to New Zealand payments to New Zealand banks. It doesn’t change how things work globally.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah. When I guess each little step is useful in the journey. But yeah, I think there’s still going to be lots of work that we can do to try and help people avoid being scammed over time.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, 100%. And look, I think there’s a lot more interest from all manner of entities and addressing, you know, the varying risks and issues we have. But we keep hearing around, you know, new techniques and approaches and people getting, you know, some pretty large sums of money, you know, getting sent off and in the wrong direction or, you know, getting scammed in one way or another. So yeah, good, good to be moving things in the right direction. Can we move faster than the online scammers? Yeah, I don’t know.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, well, especially where you’ve got new technology advancing, they seem to be getting cleverer and cleverer. I mean, for me it’s about how the ecosystem comes together. So how do the telcos work with the banks, work with government to try and help create a safer environment? So we help people understand before they’re scammed.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And we’ve actually got an episode we just recorded in the last few days that will be coming out. We’ve got some episodes coming out over the Christmas period for those who want to get their sort of fix on tech stories and insights with some of the chats with startups and others. And in one of those discussions, yeah, there was a bit of, I guess an individual within the fintech world who was sort of raising the question of, well, you know, why can’t our telcos stop these dodgy texts and calls kind of getting to us? Yeah.

Renee Mateparae:
When we are doing that, my comment.

Paul Spain:
Is that you do do a lot on that for us.

Renee Mateparae:
We are doing a lot.

Paul Spain:
You can’t get 100% of it, is that kind of the way to put it?

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve had some, you know, we’re constantly evolving our technology in this space so that we can pick up more and more threats. And so we’re seeing, you know, a large number of scams that are blocked by the networks already. But you know, they do just keep getting smarter and smarter. So we have to make sure we can keep up, keep up with the cyber criminals.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I think as an individual you only see the things that get to you.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
And you don’t know how many things are actually getting.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, yeah, we’re definitely Blocking quite a lot as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it’d be really interesting to, you know, to know. I don’t know how you, yeah. How you would equate that. But you know, let’s, let’s say you were blocking. Yeah, I’ll pick a high number, 99%, you know, of these kind of, you know, dodgy texts coming through or text and calls and then you know, if you could put a, I guess put a value on, you know, the fraud that was caused on the ones that weren’t blocked and then, well, if you were, multiply that by a hundred, probably would be quite eye watering what the impact is on those texts and calls that you do manage to block as it probably would be on emails and other platforms. I guess everyone’s got some responsibilities there.

Renee Mateparae:
Yes, exactly. Come through text message or emails. It’s always interesting. Anytime I hear about one, I’m always messaging out to family and friends to say look out for. If you see this. Yeah, yeah, don’t respond.

Paul Spain:
And social media platforms, you know, have often, you know, have often been the worst. Right. Yeah, yeah. I was with some friends over the weekend at Coromandel and I was like, oh, you won’t believe who’s just decided they want to be my friend. I’ve got a message from the world’s richest man here. Yeah, you know we joke about that stuff but you know, there’s a percentage of people that will get, you know, will get sucked in.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, I mean they’re getting pretty sophisticated globally. Like we’ve seen in the news instances where people will get, you know, an email that’s from supposedly the CEO and then that’s moved to, they’ll have a voice call that supposedly sounds like the CEO but is not. And then the latest one we heard was Gen AI being used to basically create a video. So it looks like you’re having a teams chat with a person in your business. So they’re getting smarter and smarter. We have to work out how we can keep up.

Paul Spain:
Yes, yeah, yeah. And yeah, those things aren’t going to, aren’t going to stop. And look, you know, all of us probably vulnerable at one time or another. So it’s kind of the more that they do this stuff and they hit you at the wrong moment and you know, get people that you wouldn’t expect would get scammed that do get scammed at times.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah. Important things to be talking about over the summer barbecue to make sure everybody knows to be vigilant.

Paul Spain:
I would say that is a great, great reminder. Use those, use that Barbecue time, wisely.

Renee Mateparae:
Exactly, exactly.

Paul Spain:
Now, on an international. No, there was one more sort of. On a local front was news picked up by Herald and one news around, you know, what looked like a reasonably significant fire in a family home that certainly the media reports indicate was back to somebody having a cheap phone charger that had been, you know, bought on one of these online marketplaces. I think in this case Temu and not. Yeah, not an ideal situation.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, really scary. I mean, I think there are a couple of things in that from my side. So one, I think it’s really important people think about where they buy their chargers and devices from and making sure that you buy from a reputable place. Spark’s got some great ones in our store. We’ll get.

Paul Spain:
That’s true. You’ve got a few. You’ve got a few stores there. You’ve got an online store.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, exactly. I guess. But then also the way it was being charged was the other thing. Right. So you need to make sure that you’re being careful. It was from the article, it looked like it was charged on something flammable, on soft material. So you need to pay attention to kind of where you’re putting these things and where you leave them.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s. Yeah, that’s a good point. Although we kind of just assume stuff’s all okay and that will happen. I think one of the challenges with buying on some of these online marketplaces is there is probably next to zero guaranteed that the product meets New Zealand standards.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
And it may not maybe meet any standard sometimes. Right. You know, we, we hear of, you know, whether it’s food or, or other, you know, other things in, in some countries where. Yeah. Just the, the standards are, you know, somewhat, somewhat non existent. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
So I think there needs to be at least some consideration given to that. And even if something’s got sort of a certification logo on it to say it’s certified for use, electrical use in New Zealand doesn’t 100% actually guarantee that it meets that mark. Whereas you buy from a reputable brand product locally, they have to make sure they comply. You’d like to think that we do a pretty good job locally with Commerce Commission and varying other government entities keeping a pretty close watch and slapping down any retailer that does sell something that’s inappropriate, which doesn’t tend to happen too often. So.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, sometimes if the price is too good to be true, it is too good to be true.

Paul Spain:
That is 100% right now. Yeah. On the international front. So. Yeah. Interesting. There’s been A bit of coverage around Meta apparently planning to invest, if we put it In New Zealand dollar terms, around 17 billion in a global undersea cable project for I, I guess from the things I read, really to be dedicated to Meta, to Facebook and Instagram and so on to carry their traffic.

Renee Mateparae:
Now dedicated subsea capacity is pretty intense.

Paul Spain:
I had never given too much thought to there being a need like this, but I guess you look at Meta.

Renee Mateparae:
I don’t know, Google’s similar to.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, you know, market cap is. But you know, these sort of trillion dollar plus firms. Yeah, this is the sort of thing they can afford to do and I guess it’s a sort of a counter to some of the issues. We have seen some undersea cables getting sabotaged. Yeah. Inappropriate interference. So by they’re able to then sort of pick routes that are less likely to be impacted. I wonder whether there would be any privacy element to this sort of thing.

Paul Spain:
We’ve, you know, over the years there, you know, from time to time we hear, oh yeah, the Southern Cross cable and you know, oh, maybe the government are monitoring this or that and so on. Right. You know, we’ve had these, you know, these different sort of stories and I guess, you know, if an entity like Meta wants to keep its data secure, that would be one mechanism. I haven’t seen that mentioned.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, I mean, I think that, I mean the subsea cables that exist across, you know, Southern Cross as an example, it’s very much just passing traffic. So there’s not any monitoring or anything on those. But I think the bit that I read that was interesting was they would be able to prioritise their own traffic, so they’ll be able to decide what’s the most important. So it gives them a lot more. Sounds like it might give them a lot more flexibility in how they can kind of ensure their product, user experience, that kind of thing. So that will be, that’ll be interesting. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, I think.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah. I was just, I was trying to remember where did this thought pop into my head around the Southern Cross cable getting sort of, you know, tapped into. There was, I think a comment about a decade ago, just looking here, that John Key made in regards to the gcsb. So, but then there was, you know, I think probably quite prompt response from the chief executive of Southern Southern Cross saying, no Prime Minister needs to check.

Renee Mateparae:
His facts, not a thing sort of thing.

Paul Spain:
So, you know, let’s, yeah, let’s hope our data is pretty safe. Whichever track it’s going down. But yeah, you can see why if we get ongoing sort of sabotage and interference with, you know, with connectivity. And also look, you know, the likes of Google, Microsoft, Meta, you know, aws, you know, these big global entities, you know, they have traditionally been invested in other people’s cables and so on. And so, yeah, it’s maybe just the natural next step is.

Renee Mateparae:
Well, owner economics that you own one down. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
And this is an area Spark’s been invested in as well. Right?

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
In the undersea cable front with Southern Cross and with Southern Cross next and.

Renee Mateparae:
The one that goes across to Australia as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. I’m trying to remember what the name of the Tasman Cable. Yeah, the Trans Tasman one is called Tasman Global Access.

Renee Mateparae:
That’s the tga. Tga.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, but I mean, huge growth.

Renee Mateparae:
In demand in that space, so I’m not surprised to see different groups investing in it. There’s just not enough capacity between the different countries, especially when you start having data centres and things. If you think between Australia and New Zealand, we’ve got a lot of data centre capacity in Australia that’s serving New Zealand now. And so that just drives more capacity needs across that route.

Paul Spain:
Do you see any of that dropping off as more data centres sort of get onshored and to.

Renee Mateparae:
I would expect it to, yeah. But we’re kind of, I think we’re at the beginning of a really big expansion into the, into the D.C. space, kind of localized data centers. It’s still growing, but definitely once we get onshore instances for the big, the big over the top players, then definitely, yeah.

Paul Spain:
I’m curious. Curious how that sort of, you know, how that plays into our, our growing, you know, need for, you know, moving data around the world on, yeah, fiber optic cables. It’s, you know, it’s been a, you know, an area of massive growth, you know, particularly during the years that we’ve done, you know, over the last 14 years or so we’ve been doing the podcast. Yeah, it was like, oh, this would not be good for our country if, you know, the, say the Southern Cross got. Got impacted. But of course we’ve now got a whole bunch and that just continues to increase.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, that extra resiliency is pretty key.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s really important. But yeah, I am curious as we move, we move more data to actually sitting locally and of course there’s a lot of data that’s cached locally, the likes of YouTube and Netflix and so on and has been for a long time. So, yeah, It’ll be interesting to see how that evolves. Australia has gone ahead and passed the legislation. So youngsters, those under 16 are going to be prohibited from social media platforms. Which is rather a pretty hard line.

Renee Mateparae:
To take for sure. I think it’s a world first. Right. The first country to have an actual ban for.

Paul Spain:
At a national level. I think we’ve seen sort of some, maybe some US states have goes at this sort of thing. Yeah. But to see it as a, you know, a countrywide ban and.

Renee Mateparae:
Well, it sounds like it went through Parliament pretty quickly as well.

Paul Spain:
Very quickly. It was one of these things that was. Yeah. Super swift. So not a lot of room for debate and discussion. They’re saying it’s expected to, you know, impact my own sort of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, Twitter, Reddit, but that there’s a possibility that could expand. I know initially there was talk of it covering YouTube and I remember discussing that with my son. He’s 14 years old and he was like, well, hold on, we use this at school.

Paul Spain:
This is kind of. I mean, I don’t know what age you’re used to.

Renee Mateparae:
My kids love finding the YouTubes where it teaches them to make stuff. Like it might be origami or they would just. I’ve got twin boys and they were just watching a video about how to make retractable wolverine claws out of popsicle sticks.

Paul Spain:
Okay, there you go. That sounds like a safe way to do it.

Renee Mateparae:
There’s a lot of educational stuff on there, but you’ve also gotta be really careful. Cause there’s a lot of content you don’t want them saying on there.

Paul Spain:
So true, so true. So, yeah, I mean, it seems that our content providers and social media platforms have not done a brilliant job of making us want to love them for the awesome service that they provide to humanity. There are elements where things are really great and they do really well, but there’s also been enough on the flip side that are negative that we haven’t felt that way. But the idea of a complete ban. Yeah, I wonder how problematic that could be.

Renee Mateparae:
I thought it was interesting the way it seemed like it would be implemented was more putting the onus onto the platforms to have controls in place to check that users were over 16. But it wasn’t necessarily penalising people that happened to be on the platform. So it was trying to put the accountability almost with the, with the social media platforms. I think it’s just a bit sad to get to the state where we have to have a ban on the platform because they don’t have enough social responsibility to kind of make them safe. So that, I mean, it would be awesome to think that they were being made more safe for young people instead.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, I really don’t know how this plays out, because we know in the past, like, before you could get Netflix and, you know, varying online streaming services in New Zealand, of course there were quite simple ways to be able to get that. And the technology evolves in some of these areas. But there will always be mechanisms that people can use to, you know, to get around these things. You know, whether it’s using a parent’s device that they made available and, you know, what have you. Like, there are so many variations. And I think I would lean more to this as something that families should be taking care of in terms of any sort of hard lines that need to be drawn, but also that we should see a high level of responsibility from social media platforms and content providers in terms of the things they can do to minimise harm, which is often been pretty weak. One of the flip sides of putting this, you know, a system like this in place is you then have to verify every user. So, you know, how does a platform do that? And, you know, these talk around, well, maybe it’s a sort of a facial thing.

Paul Spain:
It has a look and goes, oh, you know, the AI technology says you look over 15 or you look 16 or over or. But then also, you know, does it require ID and digital IDs and so on? And, you know, I know just like vaccines, there’s a percentage of the population that are not comfortable with, you know, digital IDs and so on. Right. And so it’s like, oh, there are things that make people uneasy for whatever reasons, and sometimes that can be irrational, sometimes it can, you know, it can make some sense. But, yeah, I think, yeah, we, we do have to be a little bit cautious around how we, how we do these things. So I’m kind of. I’m kind of glad that it’s Australia doing it, not New Zealand.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, we can watch and see how it goes.

Paul Spain:
So hopefully we get a little while to kind of figure out what’s, you know, what’s good and bad of this sort of sledgehammer approach that it feels a bit like, well, that’s probably enough on the sort of, you know, the broader news front. Shall we delve in a bit into what’s happening in the, in the Spark world and, you know, what the future holds for Spark? You know, I guess, like, really, you know, every industry has sort of been impacted through, you know, from current sort of economic situation in recent times. You know, telcos and technology companies and so on are all impacted. How’s that kind of journey been for you to navigate this year?

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s been a year of ups and downs. I think from a Spark perspective we’ve stayed focused on kind of the core purpose that we have at Spark and that’s about helping all of New Zealand win big in a digital world. And I think that kind of holds true regardless of the economic circumstances. It’s meant we’ve had to have a really laser sharp focus around what are the core parts of our business and what are the things that we need to really deliver for customers. So a much stronger focus around mobile and we’re making some significant Progress with our 5G network and then also making progress with putting in place the 5G core which will bring new capabilities. Our focus in there is really how do we give the people and businesses of New Zealand the tools and capabilities that will help them to innovate, to help improve whether it’s productivity from an economic standpoint, whether it’s sustainability? I think, and we’ve done quite a bit of research that there’s a big role that technology can play if we can help businesses and people to adopt it more quickly, there’s a big role that it can play in actually helping to turn the economy around.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I agree.

Renee Mateparae:
Setting ourselves up.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I think we’ve got to look out for what are those things from a technological perspective that we can be leveraging. And if we get that stuff right, then its impact can be sort of far and wide for people wherever they kind of sit within the country. Right?

Renee Mateparae:
Totally. Well, so just last year we worked with the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research to look at the role that digital technology can play in improving productivity. And I don’t know if you saw it, but the key outtake from it was if we had a 20% uplift in the use of digital technologies, then that could add 26 billion to the new Zealand economy. There’s billion with a B to the New Zealand economy over the next 10 years. And so that gives you kind of a sense of scale. And for me that kind of creates that environment where New Zealand becomes a really exciting place to live. It’s a place that can attract digital talent and really drive us forward to reposition in the global market. So that sort of stuff is really exciting.

Renee Mateparae:
For me it is.

Paul Spain:
And during sort of the early kind of COVID period, before we were Talking about, you know, closing borders and so on. I shared an opinion piece around the thoughts of, you know, how do. How do we kind of attract more, you know, talent to New Zealand? Because, look, pretty great country, you got to say, right?

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
And, you know, we’re well, well connected in a lot of ways. And, you know, I think there were. There were a lot of things, you know, in the app. But, yeah, we sometimes sort of hold ourselves back in differing ways. And, yeah, we’ve got to look for those opportunities to keep attracting the top talent. Sometimes that’s attracting Kiwis back home. You know, sometimes it’s about helping deliver the right sort of education to the next generation coming through. Sometimes it’s helping people retrain, sometimes it’s making the right technologies and communications available.

Paul Spain:
If we just tilt that pace up a little bit. Right. We can have a great impact.

Renee Mateparae:
When I think that’s been one of the sad things over the Last sort of 12 months is I think the investment in things in those innovation projects has kind of slowed down, which you would expect in any kind of recessionary environment. But I’m really keen to see as we start coming out of this, actually, where will people invest? What are the areas that New Zealand’s gonna be known for globally? And then how do we attract and build talent around that?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I mean, by my mind, people should be investing in technology whether the economy’s growing or shrinking. Like, technology can actually help us in any of these scenarios. Right. Because it helps bring efficiencies and. Yeah, it’s like it’s always the right time to.

Renee Mateparae:
Yes, exactly. Preaching to the converters.

Paul Spain:
Yep. So, yeah, walk us through sort of what’s happening on the 5G front, because you’ve been working on this 5G core and 5G standalone. Can you walk us through what that’s about and what that means?

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, absolutely. So 5G standalone is kind of the concept that you need to put a 5G core in place to connect to the 5G mobile sites. So if I take a step back today, lots of people will have a 5G on their phone. There’s actually a really strong device penetration for 5G, but the 5G on your phone is the 5G radio or mobile site, and then it talks to a 4G core or 4G brain. What we’re doing is putting in place our 5G core, which brings a capability called 5G standalone, and that brings about a lot of the kind of promised capabilities that 5G was said to bring, and so brings things like an ability to create network Slices. So that means, if you think about today, our networks are tuned kind of to give you a best average experience. So whether you’re using it for broadband or for your mobile, or Whether it’s an IoT device, whether you’re using it for a phone call, it’s kind of tuned to be average across all of those technologies. What you can do with 5G standalone is go right, what are the specific parameters around the network that would optimize it for use for broadband or for use for a mobile phone or for IoT devices or even for a gamer.

Renee Mateparae:
So you might create a slice that has ultra low latency, that gives a better gaming experience. And so it starts to make it more configurable. One of the other cool things. So we’re in testing of the 5G core at the moment, and one of the great things we’ve seen as a result of that is a big increase in speeds, particularly for our wireless broadband users.

Paul Spain:
So talk a little bit about that. You know, the fixed wireless, I guess it’s an alternative to, well, you know, whether it’s vdsl, adsl, fiber, you know, this is an increasingly capable option with 5G from a performance, you know, standpoint. But yeah, how’s that actually going in the market and so on?

Renee Mateparae:
We’ve got quite a few customers who use wireless to provide their broadband at the moment. One of the things that we introduced this year was a new technology, kind of like an application that sits on the modem and lets us know what speed users are getting so that we can actually understand the user experience. And then we were able to then publish those speeds on the website. So when people are buying wireless broadband, they know roughly what speeds they should expect.

Paul Spain:
Oh, that’s great. So is that you put in your address and you’ll actually be able to get a reasonable sort of idea of estimate of getting at your location.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, exactly.

Paul Spain:
That’s really cool.

Renee Mateparae:
And one of the cool things was we had better visibility into our 4G wireless previously. So that was getting kind of 62Mbps on average. Whereas when we then looked at 5G wireless, that was getting 333Mbps. So that’s like a 5x in speed. Okay. And then when we did our testing with the 5G core, we were getting up to 900Mbps. So you can kind of see the escalation in quality of experience and quality of download speeds. So we’re working a lot to make sure we can refine and tune and then get it available to people.

Renee Mateparae:
But yeah, if you go onto, onto the website and are looking for a wireless product now on our website, when you look at the plans, it will tell you the rough speeds that you should expect in your location, so long as it’s available at your address.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I’m looking at my address and yeah, I’m guessing I must be 4G because it’s suggesting 65Mbps and 90 second upload, you know, which you can still do a tremendous amount with that sort of performance. Right. It’s still enough headroom for Netflix and, you know, a bunch of other things.

Renee Mateparae:
It is a key reason though, why. So we’re working on the 5G core, but we’ve also got a big program to make sure we’re rolling out 5G across all of the mobile sites. And so we’ve got more than 120 different locations across Aotearoa now that have got 5G access.

Paul Spain:
So what does that mean in terms of like the number of cell sites? Like, you know, what would that be in terms of?

Renee Mateparae:
It’s increasing pretty rapidly all the time, but I mean, sort of circa half of the network.

Paul Spain:
Mm, okay.

Renee Mateparae:
But growing rapidly. And part of what we are doing is trying to make sure that we have it rolled out across all locations that have got a population greater than 1500. So that it’s not just in the main centres.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it’s actually noticing that, you know, some locations, I’m in a small place and I’m looking at my phone and thinking, oh, got 5G here now. That’s. Yeah, you know, it’s kind of crept up on us, I guess, because of the constant investment back into building out.

Renee Mateparae:
The 5G network and it just gives that extra capacity and speed for now. But what it means is once we get the 5G core live, then people start being able to use some of these new services as well, which will be quite cool.

Paul Spain:
And how far does 5G go for those that are sort of in rural type of situations? You know, how does that, how does 5G sort of fit into the picture for say, rural broadband?

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, it sort of depends on how rural you’re talking about. And so kind of, it’s very, so very similar to 4G. We roll out across different spectrum bands. And so the really ultra, kind of the rule of thumb is the higher the spectrum, the faster the speeds, but also the higher the spectrum, the less distance it will travel from the mobile tower. And so your really fast speeds you’ll get when we deploy a C band what’s known as a C band radio, which is at 3500 MHz. That’s pretty high compared to rural coverage, which kind of sits at about 700. So 700 versus 3500. And so we’re gradually expanding coverage.

Renee Mateparae:
We’re building new sites so that more people can get that really high speed. But it’ll be a process over the next couple of years. And we did. It was probably the year before last announced as part of selling our mobile towers, that we were committed to a significant build program so that Almost, you know, 50% again, the number of mobile sites to help just get that coverage infill and make sure that we can get higher speeds and deal with all the increase in data demand.

Paul Spain:
Yep. And in terms of, you know, rural network performance, is that, you know, noting, you know, what you’ve talked about in terms of spectrum and so on. And, you know, you’ve got, I guess, yeah, you’re trying to cover sort of broader areas, but not necessarily densely populated. You know, what are the typical sort of speeds in rural locations with your fixed wireless service?

Renee Mateparae:
I haven’t got that off the top.

Paul Spain:
Of my dropping you in on that one. I didn’t warn you to very much.

Renee Mateparae:
Depends on where you’re talking about as well. But absolutely, for people that are in rural locations, the cool thing is now you can go on and put in your address and see what’s available at your location. And also when you’re talking about the total network, it can become the law of averages. There’s always higher and lower. So it’s a much better solution. If you look at. Right. For me, where I live, this is what I can expect.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I guess, yeah, looking to sort of other areas that Spark has been working on. You’ve got the 3G network closure coming up.

Renee Mateparae:
So one of the things with 5G as I was talking about, was we need to free up spectrum that we can repurpose from 3G onto 5G. And that is part of what helps us to make 5G available rurally more widely. And so we’ve got a big program around the 3G shutdown because we know it’s quite a big, you know, it’s not a minor transition for customers who have got devices. I’m sure a lot of your listeners will already have some of the latest devices. But really the key message is for people that have got an older device and so that might be a family member and even older devices back to say an iPhone 6, so that will use 4G for data but it isn’t able to use 4G for voice calls, so it still falls back to 3G. And so what we’ve got on our website is a device checker. So you can jump onto the website, put in what phone you’ve got and it’ll tell you whether it’s 4G capable or not, and then help you kind of work through how you set it up to be 4G capable. If it is, and it’s just in the settings, or alternatively you have to then go through an upgrade of your device, doesn’t mean that you have to buy the newest flashest phone.

Renee Mateparae:
There’s lots of quite reasonably priced phones that are 4G capable. So we’re just trying to help customers kind of make that transition. And it’s both mobile phones and then also IoT devices. So a number of 3G only IoT devices out there. So we’ve got teams that are working with potential, particularly our business customers, to help them identify if they’ve got devices and then what they might be able to migrate to. And hopefully through the migration, 4G technology versus 3G is a huge difference. So what might that unlock to our earlier conversation around how they can use technology to further their productivity and improve their business? This is kind of one of those moments in time where you could use it actually to your business’s advantage.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And look, I think there’s also a reminder from, you know, from a security perspective, some of these older devices, you know, won’t have security updates and patches and so on. So if you’ve got a family member or within your workforce, you’ve got devices and so on, and those devices are, you know, getting quite long in the tooth, then you might actually need to move quicker and replace them. Because if they haven’t had security updates for some time, depending on, you know, how and what they’re getting used for, that could leave them quite vulnerable.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, you want to stay safe.

Paul Spain:
That’s important. I mean, pretty encouraging that. I think both, you know, of the sort of top players in terms of Samsung and Apple, you know, they’re both, you know, giving a lot of years of security updates and operating system updates and you know, in most cases you do have to, you know, have to check the devices. But I think, you know, looking at the most current Samsung devices, even those that are kind of sub, you know, $500, we’re now, you know, starting to see even those ones getting years worth of updates, which is great.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, that’s good. The other thing just for people to be aware of is it’s not. It’s also for people who have bought their phones overseas or imported them because quite often they’ll be set up so they are 4G capable, but not on the New Zealand bandwidth. And so that’s also worth a check.

Paul Spain:
Right, okay, that’s a good point. So with that turning off of 3G, they might lose functionality entirely or lose an ability to make calls and so on.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, yeah. And so we’ve announced to the market that our aim is to shut down 3G at the end of 2025. So it sort of gives people just over a year more to go and they’ve had sort of a year to 18 months up till now. So hoping that we can help people work through the transition.

Paul Spain:
Yep. It’s a good period of time and.

Renee Mateparae:
Then it lets us free up the spectrum so we can get 5G out to more people.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, probably a challenge for some vehicles and you know, some of these other Iot sort of situations where, yeah, a technology has kind of got this stuff embedded, right?

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
So.

Renee Mateparae:
And it does take a swap out.

Paul Spain:
Yep. If you’ve got your, if you’re, I’m trying to, trying to think probably, probably I don’t know that Ferraris have, have embedded, have embedded 3G connections because if they did, you might not be able to upgrade it and you might have to ditch it. So if anyone’s listening and they’ve got a Ferrari with, with that embedded and you need, you know, you need someone to, you know, you need to get rid of it. They’re just gonna get in touch with the show and we’ll see if we can help out. But yeah, that’s, you know, I guess it is one of these challenges with, yeah, with, with technologies that, yeah, most of our automakers are not particularly forward thinking when it comes to longevity of their technology. So yeah, I think, you know, there’s, there’s Tesla who have been very, very good around, you know, updating varying parts or having those options. I know probably well, most Teslas bought in the last five years. Well, probably all Teslas bought locally in the last five years, it’ll all be 4G.

Paul Spain:
But I think there was a period prior to that where a lot of them were 3G, but they have been able to be upgraded. But for other vehicles that have maybe got emergency calling and varying things that maybe tap into a 3G mobile network, I guess those things will stop happening. But hopefully our automakers around the world are starting to address these sorts of challenges. Right?

Renee Mateparae:
Yes, exactly.

Paul Spain:
And what’s happening on an artificial intelligence perspective within the world of Spark, because this has been quite an area of focus and investment. I guess it’s been something we talk about a lot on the New Zealand tech podcast. But yeah, I know that it’s been really, really big in your world as well. Right?

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, I know you guys are talking about it quite a lot. I think it’s been phenomenal, just the rate of acceleration for AI. In particular with generative AI, we’ve been looking at. We’ve been leveraging AI across our business for quite a few years now. And I mean, really, it’s one of those big opportunities to actually build value into the business that I can see, or that we can see, and both into how you deliver better services to customers, but as well as how you can improve the efficiency and productivity for your people as well. And so I’ll give you some examples. One of the platforms that we’ve been working on for quite a number of years now is a platform called Brain, which is. So it leverages AI capability from a sales and marketing perspective to understand what kind of deep insights about a customer based on what products they have, and then enables us to kind of personalize.

Renee Mateparae:
These are the things that might be useful to you.

Paul Spain:
Is this sort of at a retail type of level? Is that where.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, and sort of through our digital and online channels so that you’re given kind of more personalized recommendations for what might be useful. A great example was a campaign program that we’ve got running called Made for you Review. Made for you Review.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Renee Mateparae:
And so what that does is look at your current plan, look at the usage that you’ve got, and then it looks at our available plans and what’s the best plan for you? And so then it can. Can advise people if they might be getting a lot of overage, for example, because they’ve got a capped plan that potentially moving up to the next level would save them some money and vice versa. If they’re not using all of the data allocation and they’ve got too big a plan, then it can kind of recommend to move them down. So it helps people to. Right. Plan through the lifecycle of their program. And so we’ve been using AI for that. That’s kind of the front end.

Paul Spain:
Yep. And is that something that people have to go looking for? Because I know you often hear from people like, oh, I was on this plan with such and such and I’ve been paying way too much for way too long and I wish someone had told me. Is that the sort of thing that you can move to a sort of proactive type of thing rather than someone just.

Renee Mateparae:
The idea is it sort of rolls through our customers, so it can’t do kind of a blanket everybody all at once, but is rolling through customers and just helping to both kind of reach out to customers proactively. But also then if they. If somebody calls up, then the sales agent will be able to see, yeah, you might have this better plan available for you.

Paul Spain:
Sounds like a great win from a loyalty perspective for, you know, you know, customers to know that, yeah, they’re getting steered to what’s just right for them.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah. And what they need based on kind of their actual usage. That’s kind of the front end. But we’re also looking at how AI can apply from a business process perspective. So we’re doing things like moving towards zero touch provisioning. So we would have complicated business services that might take a couple of weeks to actually set up and provision. And so using AI and automation to kind of streamline that down, so it’s more push of a button. So we’re just starting.

Renee Mateparae:
Starting on that train. We’re also launching tools for our staff to use, so kind of employee assistance and things like that, and then looking at tools for our operations team. So how do you. When you’re running a network, it’s an extremely complex environment. You go into these op centers and they have huge screens of information that we’re looking at all the time. And so AI offers a really useful tool to actually help kind of cancel out some of the noise, help our teams to focus on the stuff that’s really important, which helps us to identify issues early, resolve them faster and then ultimately kind of keep the network up and running for customers more quickly.

Paul Spain:
Yep. Yeah, I guess the promise is, yeah, less outages. And outages last for, you know, shorter periods of time.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, exactly.

Paul Spain:
And so on. Right, yeah, less outages, less impact as well.

Renee Mateparae:
So we’re looking at ways that rather than having a. How do you architect the network so that then you’ve got less people impacted by a specific fibre cut, for example, so you can have less outages, less people affected and faster to fix.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, that’s really interesting. And talk to us, what’s happening in the world of data centers for Spark? Yes, we mentioned that earlier on and yeah, of course we’ve got the big hyperscalers moving onto New Zealand shores and starting to see those. Just the initial parts of those lighting up with Microsoft having turned theirs on and no doubt the other ones will follow, but it’s not just about those companies, is it?

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, I think. I mean, we’ve had a sharpening of our focus to be really focused around mobile from a current growth portfolio. And data centers is where we see as our future growth portfolio. Because you can see a huge escalation in the amount of data that’s being used. Can see a huge demand for more capacity and more compute onshore. Like we talked about earlier, I think there’s some really interesting conversations being had around data sovereignty and what do you want to make sure you keep on? Sure as well. And so through that we’ve been looking at what’s the role that we as spark can play in that fabric or digital infrastructure for New Zealand. So we’ve got an existing portfolio that’s just over 22 megawatts of capacity, and that’s across Auckland, but also regional centres.

Renee Mateparae:
So we’ve got a data centre in the Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and all around. But we’ve also been making quite big investments that we’ve announced around our DCs. And so one was we’ve just opened a new data centre in South Auckland. So last year we completed that, it was another 10 megawatts of capacity out in Takanini. And we’ve got extra land adjacent to that so we can expand that to another sort of 60 megawatts. Wow. So 10 to plus 60, that’s huge. So that’s South Auckland, also on the north shore.

Renee Mateparae:
We’ve announced that we’ve got a resource consent there to build quite a large data centre. And so the cool thing about that one is that the resource consent also included a surf park, which sounds weird.

Paul Spain:
Sounds cool, actually.

Renee Mateparae:
I think it sounds cool. But the idea of it from a sustainability perspective, you’ve got a big data center creating huge amounts of heat, and so you can then transfer and use that heat to heat the water of the surf park, so you can have warmer water for the surf park. And then we’ve also got solar farm on site as well to provide solar energy, so that we’re just reducing that footprint that DCs can create. And so that over time is another 40 megawatts of capacity. So all up, including some of the work that we’re doing in the Waikato, for example, we’ve got plans or a development pipeline for an additional 118megawatts of capacity. So that on top of our 22, kind of shows you the level of growth.

Paul Spain:
That’s a massive increase, isn’t it? So where does that business come from? How do you see that sort of breaking out in terms of where the revenue is going to come from, the shorter to longer term.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah. I mean, the revenues come from all sorts of different places. I mean, hyperscalers also locate in data centers that aren’t their own, but also the likes of Meta. You’ve got lots of business customers that need DC capability. And particularly if you take some of the trends around generative AI and actually wanting that compute closer to the users, we’d expect that there’ll be a big acceleration in demand for DC space locally and as close to the user as possible.

Paul Spain:
Yep, Yep. Okay. Now, one of the things that we’ve chatted about in the past is Internet of Things and IOT World. What’s happening there? What does the growth look like and how’s that evolving?

Renee Mateparae:
I think that was the last time I was on the show, 18 months ago with Michelle, who leads the IoT business. IoT is growing massively. It’s one of our key growth areas of use of the mobile network. So we surpassed 2 million connections just this last year, which is pretty huge. That’s a significant amount of growth. We celebrated the 1 million connections not quite a year earlier. So we’re growing fast. So that’s exciting.

Renee Mateparae:
One of the other exciting things is we’re seeing people use IoT in some really cool different ways. So one example is a program that we’ve been working on with the Ministry of Primary Industries around fisheries fishing boats. And so what that’s doing is bringing together a whole lot of tech. And so the idea is it helps fishers to report their catch data. And so previously, all of the data would have had to have been put onto a disk and then couriered in. But what this new solution does is we’ve got onboard cameras, which are the IoT. It uses AI and computer vision to actually analyze the catch and make sure it can capture all of the information. Then it uses the 4G and 5G network to send the data straight back for processing.

Renee Mateparae:
And all of that kind of happens much more quickly than capturing it on a disk and then couriering it in. So it was a cool example of where you kind of bring the different capabilities of technology together and then use it as a way of solving a problem that previously was quite manual and difficult. And also we’re pretty sure that it’s a world first and got lots of interest globally in how the solution works and rolling it out.

Paul Spain:
So not every area of the ocean is going to have coverage. So this sort of what works on a basis of when they come into a coverage area. Yeah.

Renee Mateparae:
When they come into just sort of.

Paul Spain:
Streams the data back when there is that connectivity.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it can do the analysis on the boat and then when it gets back, it can quickly transfer all of the data back up back into the network.

Paul Spain:
And how do you see sort of, you know, satellite playing into the. Into the picture, you know, over time? You’ve obviously got, you know, previously announced partnership with Lync and, Yeah, I guess there’s a lot going on sort of in the satellite world as well. Right.

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah. I mean, I think we think satellite will play an important role, especially in places like New Zealand or if you’re in marine environments, where it just doesn’t make sense to be building a mobile site. And so we expect that the satellite solutions, as they start to become available, will be something that we’ll be offering to customers and ideally working across both everything from broadband to mobile to IoT and leveraging that as another way of accessing. Of access.

Paul Spain:
Yep. So that’s sort of a partnership, sort of type of play of whoever’s got the best sort of options you’ll be looking to kind of tap in with. Is that how that works?

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah. And there’s lots of different players in this space at the moment, so it’ll be interesting to see how it develops over the next year or so.

Paul Spain:
Yep, yep. Yeah. It’s certainly interesting to see it evolving.

Renee Mateparae:
When different, depending on what you’re trying to do.

Paul Spain:
Right.

Renee Mateparae:
Whether it’s broadband, whether it’s IoT, there are different solutions and it’s been something that’s been out there for a while.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. So what is the, you know, what else around? The future of Spark and, you know, what’s ahead. Can you share anything else we’ve missed?

Renee Mateparae:
Not anything else. I think for me it’s really around how do we make sure we’re having conversations for how digital technology can be used. And so that’s actually talking to customers to understand the problems that it can solve, rather than just building a technology that I’ll build it and they will come approach. And so for me, I’m really excited to see some of these new capabilities become available through things like standalone, but also through IoT, and then how we can partner with different businesses across Aotearoa to solve real problems, whether that’s improving productivity, whether it’s helping sustainability outcomes. Actually, how can we kind of work together to work out how we solve some things and put New Zealand in a better foot?

Paul Spain:
Yep. We need to definitely keep at it. That’s great. Yeah. Oh, well, thank you very much for coming back on the show.

Renee Mateparae:
Thanks for having me.

Paul Spain:
Great things up, Renee. Fantastic. And yeah, we’ll look forward to following the progress. I know there’s always a lot of things afoot. Yes, yes. And you’ve made a move of premises?

Renee Mateparae:
Oh, we have, yes.

Paul Spain:
As well, I think since we last caught up as well.

Renee Mateparae:
Yes. We’ve just moved into a new headquarters for our Auckland office. So we’re down just a couple of blocks away from where the head office used to be to a building at 50 Albert street, which is, which is a really interesting building, I think one of the first six star wellbeing rated buildings in Aotearoa. So it’s very exciting. We’re halfway through the move.

Paul Spain:
Okay.

Renee Mateparae:
Lots of things to iron out. But yeah, it’s, it’s good, Good to do before Christmas and have a fresh start.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yep. Oh, it’s nice. Nice to have, have a great HQ and place to work from, huh?

Renee Mateparae:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Paul Spain:
Great. Oh, well, thank you. And of course, a big thank you to our show partners, including Spark, One NZ, 2degrees, HP and Gorilla Technology for supporting the New Zealand Tech Podcast. And thanks everyone for listening in. Of course, if you’re listening to this through an audio app, which tends to be most of the audience, then of course you can also find us on your favorite live streaming app. Follow me on LinkedIn to get the LinkedIn lives. But we’re also across YouTube and Facebook and X for live streams. So, yep, wherever you want to follow, feel free to do so.

Renee Mateparae:
Thanks for having me.

Paul Spain:
Thanks again, Renee. Cheers.

Renee Mateparae:
See you.

Paul Spain:
Ciao.