I understand that Spark was strict about the joint release. My...

I understand that Spark was strict about the joint release. My take on it is that they didn't want to be boxed into specific numbers at this stage for competitive reasons. To have announced they would take 100, 300 or 2000 over time would signal to One NZ what their plans were.
They had nothing to gain from pumping up the NET share price. Fair enough. They need to thoroughly research demand.

But yes on any objective measure it is a "good announcement." Netlinkz steps up a notch as potential networ- as-a-service supplier for carriers rather than just internal networks for clients like the big ($165 billion market cap) "sporting goods company", the well known "German bank", the "largest retailer in China" and the extensive IoT Sichuan water monitoring project which aggregates networks data across a district north Chengdu. These can can all be dismissed as pilots or "one-offs."

And it isn't just Spark. HGC is a fairly sophisticated outfit and would be very familiar with the networking products of Juniper, Cisco, Akemi etc so its interesting that Netlinkz and HGC are in conclave. HGC is a US owned business so that puts another slant on it as well.