seeby:

 

Hi All

 

I'm the owner / founder of Voyager so I thought I'd chip in.

 

I absolutely hate having to do price increases!

 

 

 

Firstly, we didn't increase our price on all plans. We had a 12 month term price at $79 for 300/100 and Open term was $89. 

 

We simply withdrew the $79 plan and made all plans $89 as we can't make money at $79 and provide a quality service anymore

 

 

 

Voyager has absorbed our rising costs for the last 5 years in a row without passing these onto customers.

 

Every year, Chorus adjusts the price of their fibre tail services upwards according to CPI. Normally it's not a big deal, but this year inflation is running at 6-8%

 

(A $5 increase in chorus cost across 20,000 connections is $100,000 a month!)

 

 

 

In addition, Chorus just unilaterally decided to triple the speeds of the 100/20 plan to 300/100 without consulting ISPs.

 

Now - I'm a fan of speed, so I do support this, but when 100/20 connections were increased, our usage of data to the wider internet went up 14% in a single month - all stuff we have to pay for.

 

So what we did was remove our cheaper plan, make all plans the same, and charge an amount that we can afford to provide full speed and a quality service.

 

 

 

Voyager spends a lot of money having our own network all the way to Australia, and directly peers with approx 700 organisations across a large number of peering exchanges.

 

We do this so that our routes to Asia and the whole internet are as good as possible - we want to be premium

 

Some people won't care about this, and are happy with an ISP that just has a single crappy upstream bandwidth provider, but we try and do a really good job with our peering and connectivity, and it all costs money

 

 

 

Our recently increased pricing is still 95c cheaper than Orcon (my old company) at $89.95 for 300m, and it's likely that a number of the large ISPs will increase prices - so they may even end up higher than us still

 

 

 

I hope that a number of you will continue to support Voyager for what I believe is still the best network, speeds and Helpdesk that money can buy.

 

 

 

PS - We have not launched Chorus new 50mb plan because they only charge $7 less per 50mb port than a 300mb port, however they have mandated that the RRP is no more than $59. $59 is $30 less than our 300mb plan, but the cost to service are nearly identical (apart from the $7 cheaper port). So we can't price a plan $30 cheaper that only costs us $7 less than our main plan to service. A lot of other ISPs are unsure how to proceed with this plan as well.

 

 

 

PPS - Most customers who have had a Voyager price increase had their pricing go up by $10. However some customers have had increases of up to $30 or so if they had very old pricing, and multiple free VOIP services or something. These super cheap plans were customers that we acquired in other companies (HD / Unlimited / Actrix etc), and we never wanted to change or increase pricing as we were afraid of losing people. Unfortunately, having inconsistent pricing is not fair to other customers, and these customers we worked out we were now actually losing money on big time. So we took an opportunity to really standardise our whole customer base on a single price, which is still in line with the other large providers (super cheap providers excluded)

 

 

 

If Chorus wants to start charging us less, then I'm happy to charge customers less, but at the moment, Chorus is 80% of the cost of a Broadband connection, and if they put their prices up, we either have to do the same eventually, or go out of business :-(

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers

 

Seeby Woodhouse

 

Founder - Voyager

 

 

 

Can you tell us why it bumped us from the $79 plan to the $109 plan without asking us? That much of a unexpected price rise is sending us elsewhere.