Ask the phone companies and 5G is everywhere. One NZ tells customers its coverage now runs to “99% over 4G and 5G” and that 5G is “available throughout the country.” Spark and 2degrees promote their 5G just as heavily. So we went to the public record to see where the 5G transmitters actually are, and mapped every one of them.
The answer is that New Zealand has real 5G at 2,656 cell sites, and the gaps between them are easy to find. The map below is built from the Register of Radio Frequencies, the licence database the government keeps of every radio transmitter in the country. It shows the notspots as clearly as the coverage.
What the map actually shows
This is a map of licensed 5G transmitters, not a guaranteed-coverage map. Every carrier that wants to run a 5G radio has to hold a licence for it, and each licence in the register records the frequency and the exact location of the site. We pulled every current transmit licence held by Spark, One NZ and 2degrees, kept the ones on cellular bands, and flagged any site licensed on the 3.5 GHz band that carries almost all of New Zealand’s 5G.
That gives 5,743 cell sites across the three networks, of which 2,656 are now licensed for 5G. A licence at a site is a reliable sign that 5G equipment is installed and pointing at the surrounding area, but it is not the same as a signal-strength reading at your front door. Hills, buildings, distance and how many people are using the tower all change what you actually get. The soft glow on the map is an indicative reach around each transmitter, not a promise. For that reason we have not dressed it up as a coverage map, and there is a note further down on how to check your own address.
Where the 5G is
Almost half of every carrier’s sites now carry 5G, but the raw numbers differ. One NZ has the most 5G sites at 1,133, Spark has 887 and 2degrees has 680. Because the three networks share a lot of masts, that adds up to 2,656 distinct physical sites with a 5G radio on them, about 46 percent of all cell sites in the country.
The concentration is exactly where you would guess. Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton, Tauranga and the other main centres light up densely. Drive out of a city and the glow thins to a string of dots along the state highways and the bigger towns, then goes dark.
Where the notspots are
Grouping the sites by region shows the divide plainly. Between about 47 and 50 percent of cell sites carry 5G across the greater Auckland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty and Wellington regions, and about 46 percent in Canterbury. The share falls to 41 percent through the central North Island, 37 percent across Otago and Southland, and just 18 percent at the top of the South Island, taking in Nelson, Marlborough and the West Coast.
That last figure is the story for anyone outside the main centres. In much of rural New Zealand the nearest 5G transmitter is a long way off, and the everyday network is still 4G, or a single bar of something older. It is the same digital divide that shows up in fibre and copper, mapped onto the newest layer of the network. The rollout is following the population and the money, which is rational for a business and cold comfort if you farm in the Mackenzie or live up a valley in Golden Bay.
One NZ has taken a different route to those gaps, using Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites to reach places no tower covers. That is a genuine fix for the deepest notspots, but it is not 5G, and it does not put a fast mobile-data signal on a farm that never had one.
Why it is all on one band
One thing the register makes clear is that New Zealand’s licensed 5G is, for now, overwhelmingly a single-band affair. Every 5G site in the transmit licences is on the 3.5 GHz band, the mid-range frequency that carries most of the world’s 5G because it balances speed against distance. Carriers can also run some 5G on the lower frequencies they share with 4G, and those do not always show up separately in the register, but there is no sign yet of dedicated 5G on the low 700 MHz band that would reach much further into the countryside, and none on the very high millimetre-wave frequencies the carriers have talked about for stadiums and dense city blocks.
That matters for the notspots. Because 3.5 GHz does not travel as far as the lower frequencies that carried 3G and 4G into the regions, a 5G map will always be patchier than an older coverage map until the carriers switch on 5G at lower bands. When they do, the rural picture should improve without a single new tower being built.
For anyone worried about the Gs
Every new band and every new tower brings out the question of whether any of this is safe, so it is worth setting out what the official position actually is, plainly and from the source. In New Zealand the exposure limits for all radio transmitters, 5G included, are set by a standard called NZS 2772.1, which is based on guidelines from the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection. Health New Zealand, whose guidance was last updated in March 2026, says the public limits are set more than 50 times below the recognised threshold for any established health effect.
The regulator has measured the fields around several hundred New Zealand cell sites. At most of them the strongest reading was less than 1 percent of the legal limit, and where it was higher it was rarely more than a few percent. None has ever exceeded the limit. Under the Resource Management Act, if a company predicts a new site will exceed even a quarter of the public limit, it has to pay for independent measurements and file them with the council.
On 5G specifically, Health New Zealand’s position is blunt. It uses similar frequencies to 4G, its exposures are similar to or lower than 3G and 4G, and there is nothing about the way 5G puts information on a radio wave that makes it interact differently with the body. The millimetre-wave frequencies that worry some people are not in use here yet, and when they arrive they run at lower power and barely penetrate the skin. The agency also offers a fair test for the flood of conflicting material online, which is to ask whether a source weighs up all the evidence or only presents the parts that support one view.
None of that will settle the argument for everyone, and it is not meant to. The point of the map is a different one. The real gap in New Zealand’s 5G is not too much signal in the cities but too little of it in the regions, and that is a question about who gets served and who gets left waiting, not about radiation.
How to check your own address
Our map is the best public picture of where the transmitters are, but the only way to know what you will get at a specific address is the carrier’s own coverage checker. Spark, One NZ and 2degrees each publish an address-level map, and since the start of 2025 the industry has used standardised wording, developed in response to Commerce Commission guidelines, so the maps can be compared more fairly. If mobile signal matters for where you live or work, check all three before you sign anything, and treat a prediction as a prediction.
We will refresh this map as the networks grow, and the low-band and millimetre-wave layers are the ones to watch. Is your street on the map or in a notspot, and has 5G made any real difference to you? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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