Nearly 600,000 homes and businesses have high-speed fibre-optic internet connections, a 54 percent increase from 2017, Stats NZ says.

'Through Ultra-Fast Broadband fibre connections, more New Zealanders are now able to stream movies, play video games, and video-call one another in high-definition, without time lags or buffering,” says business performance manager Laura O'Leary.

Fibre-optic cable supports much of the world's internet, cable television, and phone systems and is being rolled out around New Zealand. Fibre-optic cabling transmits data via light signals, which allows extremely fast bandwidth speeds into our homes and businesses.

This is much faster than traditional copper-wired transmission of data.

Nearly 1 in 3 broadband connections were fibre in 2018, compared with 1 in 8 connections in 2016, the Internet Service Provider Survey shows.

The total number of fibre connections more than doubled in the past two years, to 598,000 at June 2018. From 2017, fibre connections increased by 209,000.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment's latest Broadband deployment update shows 1.4 million homes and businesses can access fibre.

'This figure was around 1.2 million last year,” Mrs O'Leary said. "This shows the uptake of New Zealanders connecting to fibre is matching the increase in the availability to connect."

The Internet Service Provider Survey is an annual survey sent to all internet service providers in New Zealand.