The graphic below is an estimate of the state of New Zealand’s Internet Service Provider market as at Q3 2015. As with the Q1 2015 Estimate below, it draws on public information from Statistics New Zealand (Stats) and the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC). This survey also considers Internet data from Internet backbone provider Hurricane Electric. The methodology of this estimate has changed significantly since the last published report – notes on the estimate’s production follow the graphic.

Stats published their latest annual ISP Survey in October 2014. It covers 1.98 million Internet connections from 85 Internet Service Providers, and characterises ISPs by size bands. Additional data requested by Telco2 cited mean and median subscriber count for all but the largest ISP size band.

APNIC has served tens of millions of google ads to the world to help determine the penetration of IPv6. The advertisements have special code that connects to APNIC servers and reports number of technical parameters, and test results include the client’s Autonomous System Name (ASN). APNIC’s data set has changed since Q1 2015, in that there are far more samples, but statistically insignificant measurements have been eliminated. This removes many “small” and all “very small” ISPs from the data set.

To provide a ranking and market estimate, I first normalised APNIC’s data set and recoded a number of data points to take into account recent mergers and acquisitions. While in Q1 I eliminated end user ASNs (including universities and large corporations), in Q3 I used BGP data from Hurricane Electric to determine the ISPs of these large users, and proportionally assigned market share to their ISPs. This brings new ISP into the survey: REANNZ. It also results in significant increases in market share for 2degrees, Vocus, Voyager, Kordia, Vector, and Solarix.