Over the past 6 months a mix of four friends and colleagues of mine have moved house – something I have not done for more than a decade and that I guess is why I have never payed that much attention to the issue of broadband access at home.
I have had broadband at home for over 9 years, migrating to a wireless network 4 years ago. It works and despite Telecom NZ’s decision to remove my unlimited access plan – much to my disgust I have not thought much of it. It has become like the other utilities of power and water – something we just expect to be there at the flick of a switch.
So imagine my surprise and in someways sense of shock when each of these individuals struggled with the complexities of accessing a new broadband connection at their new home. At worst some have suffered delays of as long as 2 weeks, others a couple of days. The problem seems to be that broadband is like a game of musical chairs!
If you have a connection all well and good, but as soon as you relinquish it someone will snap up the connection and you are left trying to get space in the exchange to get connected. The set up of exchanges is clearly not adequate. It appears that the more people that are connected at an exchange then the more sharing goes on and the slower the connection becomes.
This is why when I received my notification from Telecom the other day they very politely tell me that I can no longer retain my “Go Large” plan with its unlimited data. Sorry they say, we would like to move you to our new “Big Time” plan and by the way just to let you know “we manage all traffic on Big Time to optimise the experience for everyone. When the network is busy (9am to 2am) you may notice reduced speeds”
So if I am getting this right – I am now going to have to use the web between those 7 hours of 2am to 9am to see the true benefits of broadband – because if I dare to use the web in “normal” hours I will be putting an undue strain on the system and you will throttle me back!
This is not logical nor particularly customer centric – I have paid my subscription to the service for many years and now for the “greater good” of everyone else I am going to have to accept working in the wee small hours. If this was a true utility like water and power and my usage went up they would provide more capacity (and I would pay for it) – I am in principle happy to pay for better service, but this new plan costs more for a poorer service!
Broadband is and should be a high priority – it is the new catalyst to drive us as a country to greater economic wealth and prosperity – but sorry – you have to accept slower speeds because we all need to use it responsibly and because inadequate investment was made in the upgrade to broadband by Telecom over the years?
This has always been the problem with these national monopolies like Telecon and British Telecon. They have invested in poor broadband technologies such as ADSL on which performance is very much based on contention ratios – the more connections they sell, the slower the bandwidth.
I am lucky to live in an area served by TelstraClear and my cable broadband is very fast indeed and hasn’t slowed at all over the past few years, despite the significant increase in usage.
As more and more workers begin to telecommute, they will need access to high performance broadband for telephone and videoconferencing with their offices and Telecom just aren’t delivering that.
Strummer,
Thanks for those comments – were you can these competitive new entrants provide a demonstration of the type of broadband we would all like to see.
We may rate well on internet access now at 88% of all NZ’ers but when it comes to broadband we lag behind and what we have is not world class by any stretch of the imagination!
Many house buyers want to know that they can get fast broadband in the suburbs they are considering and in Pt Chevalier we are lucky as we were the first area to get the fast cabinetised broadband.
This afternoon at the office we are running at 15,280 megabits per second download speed. You can check your own speed at http://www.speedtest.net
Would be interesting to see who has the best speed out there? Strummer – let us know what your Telstra connnection is running at.
Alistair – what did Go Large plan cost per month?
We have Pro Plan at $79.95 at the office and that has a 40gB data cap and at home the Explorer Plan at $49.95 that has a 10gB data cap. Neither of these plans have capped download or upload speeds. Have no probem with either of the connections.
http://www.telecom.co.nz/broadband/select/1,10627,205728-204466,00.html
It’s telstra cable or nothing for me!
Though a number of clients have recently had problems because telstra say they are no longer running overhead connections. Obviously the customer has to bear the brunt of getting the driveway dug up and new cable run from the nearest connection point.
Am glad I got hooked up when they were running overhead wiring, I wouldn’t go back to telecom and have even had myself physically disconnected from the telecom network.
Ross
The Go Large was $49.95 a month unpcapped and largely pt restricted, although the performance has been not as good as it used to be.
The Telecom option of Big Time is $59.95 with no data cap but restricted speeds.
The explorer is as you say $49.9 for 10GB, but here is the punch – go over that cap and wow – they will throttle you back to dial up speed!!