VDSL Pricing vs ADSL

I don't see by what token it's 'its pretty much the same except you get 3 X downloads and 10 X upload'. Telecom's pricing used to be rather bad, but it's gotten a lot better recently, particularly for resonably high usage which I assume we're talking about (most people only using 50GB a month probably won't care about VDSL2 much). By way of comparison you can get 500GB from Telecom for $119 including a homeline. With Snap's VDSL2 (which I agree is the only decently price option out there), you only get 300GB for $120 and with no phone line. If you want a phoneline with a local number, you pay $11.50 - $15 more for a VOIP phone line depending on who you use. If you want to go up to 550GB with Snap VDSL2, you need to pay $140. And this still no phone line.

Okay you do get the free off peak ('all you can eat nights') with Snap but having used both a free offpeak and an unlimited plan in the past, I can see even when you leave your computer on all the time anyway it's far more convenient to not have to worry about when you use the internet. To be fair, 300GB is a more reasonable data cap then what I had in the past. However depending on the service level, I'm not convinced you could frequently achieve 500GB in total using the 300GB+offpeak unless you had a specific usage pattern.

In other words, no it isn't 'pretty much the same except you get 3 X downloads and 10 x upload'. Whether or not the price premium is worth it is up to the user but it's clearly not 'pretty much the same' unless you have a rather odd definition of 'the same'.

Of course the big complaint on price is not just the higher price but the comparison with UFB. You can get 550GB with Snap UFB including a VOIP phone line for $120. As with many ISPs, the lowest level UFB price with VOIP phone from Snap is pretty much the same as the non naked ADSL2 bundle price from them. So not surprisingly, this compares well with the Telecom ADSL2 price. But of course if you're like me and UFB isn't arriving for at least 3 years, you're SOL. UFB is being partly subsidised by the government but does this mean that the government should discourage or prevent reasonable regulation based on existing rules just to push people to something a lot of the country can't get? Even ignoring regulation, I think it's an open question whether Chorus is really making a smart move here or have effectively ensured VDSL never gets much usage in NZ when they could easily be making more money if they weren't so convinced of the need to keep prices high. And without wanting to take this thread too far OT, many people did question whether the UFB tender process was done well or by design it gave way too much priority to Chorus.

The other thing of course is until recently, there hasn't been a good reason to go with Telecom. You could get a similar level of service from others with more data or cheaper price. Or even more data with a lower level of service. The fact that Telecom's prices were silly until recently is not a good reason to say VDSL2 pricing isn't expensive.

The prices you quote for Telecom are not nationwide pricing they quote for AK, WGT and CHCH so a lot of people pay another $10. My point being it was close for a dramatic increase in speed which everyone has complained about how backwards the internet in this country is yet its the opposite. Ask anyone on the forum if they would give up their VDSL I know I would not and I bet nobody else would either.

sbiddle

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