Since there is so little feedback on NOW NZ, I'm adding this. Here are my thoughts on NOW after using them for nearly 2 months.. Unlimited Fibre 100/20, Wellington/Lower Hutt region.

 

1. Customer Service
Top-notch. You can call up and be connected to a person in under 5 minutes. And I think, in general, the the "reading from a script" element is less than your typical behemoths. In my experience they have often sought clarification from somebody else while I am waiting.

 

2. Support
Haven't really needed a huge amount of support. But they (in my area, anyway) even have remote support technicians that will come out to your place if needed. Seems like a good idea to sanity check basic issues I suppose.

 

3. Pricing
Very sharp. I think $85/mo is very competitive and its only $10/mo more for a landline.

 

4. Network
From what bgp.he.net says it is a 60/40 mix between 2degrees and Kordia (which seems to be essentially Spark/Global Gateway transit). From my experience (and from other users) nearly everything international is via Spark, (AWS Sydney via 2degrees is an exception that I found).

 

Speeds are pretty good, including to international destinations. Never really had any "problems" here. Which I suppose indicates they are big enough that they have enough bandwidth for their client base. Netflix, Lightbox, YouTube, streaming is perfect (I guess they have local caches anyway) 

 

Latency and routing is unfortunately a downer. In my experience, the 2degrees network from a latency and routing perspective is better than Spark/Global Gateway across the board. Pretty much every site/destination I have tested is worse; in some cases its substantial (e.g. 40ms differences to Chicago, 60ms difference to Amsterdam.. but this is obviously highly variable!).

 

Moreover, it seems that all traffic transits via Napier (their home). So even going from NOW Wellington -> NOW Wellington results in approx 13ms RTT latency. The worst I have seen is NOW Wellington -> "Other" Wellington at approx 26ms RTT which seems to go up and down the country twice maybe?

 

IPv6, no support. Judging from their FAQ this is not a priority at this time.

 

Conclusion
I would highly recommend NOW for 95% of users. Essentially you get a good network (similar network to Spark/BigPipe) paired with excellent service, for a very good price. I would say this is perfect for parents, for instance :-)

 

The only hesitation is if you care about any latency-sensitive applications or IPv6, in which case I suggest looking elsewhere.