What is Gigatown?

Gigatown is a one year competition for New Zealand towns to show their worthiness as New Zealand's fibre showcase. This is an opportunity to have the fastest internet in the Southern Hemisphere. #GigatownDunedin is our response to their challenge.

The winning town will be enabled with 1Gbps fibre connections (at entry level prices), and granted $200,000 (by sponsor Chorus) to create businesses around this lightning fast internet. 

Here's the catch. The winning town will be judged in the social media arena...

Visit www.gigatown.co.nz to find out more.

Do you want to help?

For Dunedin to win Gigatown we need everyone to help! Tell your family and friends to sign up now, and getting chatting to us on social media about how you think gigatown would benefit Dunedin. Here are five easy ways you can earn points:

1. Join Up as a #gigatowndunedin supporter

2. Post comments on the GigatownDunedin Facebook page using the hashtag #GigatownDunedin

3. Add the hashtag #GigatownDunedin to all your Instagram pics

4. Add the hashtag #GigatownDunedin to all your tweets, posts and video uploads

5. Retweet you support on Twitter using the hashtag #GigatownDunedin

1 gigabit per second is really, really fast internet!

It helps when we know what a gigabit is - It's 1,000 megabits, not 1,000 megabytes. When you do the math this is about 125 MB/s.

While 125 MB/s might not sound as impressive as the word gigabit, have a think about it: running at this speed should be able to theoretically transfer a gigabyte of data in a mere eight seconds. This speed is incredible, you could download a movie in less time it takes to drink a beer or make a cup of tea!

the math: Eight bits in a single byte, 1,000,000,000 bits divided by 8 bits = 125,000,000 bytes, about a million bytes in a megabyte, therefore a gigabit network should be capable of delivering a theoretical maximum transfer of about 125 MB/s.

We're saying lots! 

Come join the conversation

The implications for Dunedin would be significant and wide-reaching. 

Faster broadband provides a powerful platform for innovation and growth. It will help families and communities connect to each other and to society. It will help businesses get products and services to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world.

Learn more on our blog ... which is coming soon

HOW does THE GIGATOWN COMPETITION WORK and how do I earn points for Dunedin?

Gigatown is split into two round. Round one of the gigatown competition will end in September 2014. To make round two, Dunedin needs to be in the top five on the leaderboard.

Chorus has evened the playing field during round one by adding population point multipliers to smaller towns' votes. Dunedin is the largest eligible city to win gigatown making our population multiplier factor 1.0. 

In round two, the top five towns will battle it out to become New Zealand's #Gigatown. At the beginning of round two, the scoreboards will be reset to zero, and the population point multipliers will be removed. 

Chorus is regularly sweeping for spam, so don't bother (learn more about spam here). What we're looking for are meaningful conversations on social media about ultra fast internet, and what it might do for Dunedin. 

Join our online communities.