Voyager Residential Price Rises 1 July

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Nate001

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#296235 31-May-2022 21:30

Bummer they're raising prices effective 1st July by $10. They did elude to it end of last year when they emailed about 300/100 speed upgrades. Only its only $10 but another cost pressure on already tough times, food, petrol etc.

Are they the first company to raise the prices from the rest of the telcos? Wonder how many others will quickly follow...

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#2921137 31-May-2022 21:38

I suspect most if not all will follow

RunningMan

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#2921537 1-Jun-2022 18:42

They are ditching the 50/10 plans as well, upgrading customers to 300/100. $20 increase for those still on that plan.

Would have been nice if they had considered keeping an entry level product in line with https://sp.chorus.co.nz/product-update/confirmed-entry-level-offer

mattwnz

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#2921552 1-Jun-2022 19:25

Have people looked at Flip? It looks to only provide one speed but slower. But looks like quite a good price for some users..

Nate001

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#2921589 1-Jun-2022 21:35

RunningMan:

They are ditching the 50/10 plans as well, upgrading customers to 300/100. $20 increase for those still on that plan.

Given how cut throat the broadband market and people jump ship all the time, I'm honestly surprised they're twisting the screws hard when the cost of living is out of control. They probably did not have many customers on 50/10 and low margins so no big losses if they all leave, and if they stay and pay $20 extra then even better.

Until other companies also raise the price, why would you sign up with Voyager when they're $10-15/month more than everyone else? Its bold being first.

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#2921593 1-Jun-2022 21:42

Sorry, this is my fault. After plodding along on a gigabit plan with an old router that can only manage 300 Mb/s, I had a choice: Downgrade to a new 300 meg plan, or upgrade the router. Now that I've finally dropped cash on a router, there's a price increase :(

[Edited to be a little less argumentative]

danfaulknor

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#2921594 1-Jun-2022 22:00

Chorus tail pricing is going up 5% more or less across the board. Detailed on this publicly available page

With the race to the bottom on internet prices that's being going on lately, nobody has any margin left to eat the price increase.

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#2921674 2-Jun-2022 08:24

Time to lock into 12 month contracts ;)

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richms

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#2921755 2-Jun-2022 11:47

xpd:

Time to lock into 12 month contracts ;)

Well considering they can always do what voyager did and let you off the contract I dont think it will achieve anything to go on one now, they also all have terms that allow them to put it up if their costs change and let you off the term too.

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#2921787 2-Jun-2022 13:42

Nate001:

RunningMan:

They are ditching the 50/10 plans as well, upgrading customers to 300/100. $20 increase for those still on that plan.

Given how cut throat the broadband market and people jump ship all the time, I'm honestly surprised they're twisting the screws hard when the cost of living is out of control. They probably did not have many customers on 50/10 and low margins so no big losses if they all leave, and if they stay and pay $20 extra then even better.

Until other companies also raise the price, why would you sign up with Voyager when they're $10-15/month more than everyone else? Its bold being first.

Mine was 300/100 originally 100/20. it's bumping me $20 a month....had a good ride to date if I am fair about it

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RunningMan

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#2921881 2-Jun-2022 16:13

danfaulknor:

Chorus tail pricing is going up 5% more or less across the board. Detailed on this publicly available page

Appears to still be a proposal at this stage although that may well be a technicaity; I don't know.

rugrat

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#2922010 2-Jun-2022 17:33

danfaulknor:

Chorus tail pricing is going up 5% more or less across the board. Detailed on this publicly available page

With the race to the bottom on internet prices that's being going on lately, nobody has any margin left to eat the price increase.

5% on sub $100 is less then $5, so the price charged going up by $10 is over a 100% increase on the wholesale cost increase.

My contract with different ISP is a few months from ending, will watch and see what happens to prices in general and then make decision.

Chorus are proposing a $2 limit increase on Fibre Max, so out to get a few more dollars off people on lower plans, which may be people with lower incomes, or people that know no real world benefit for them to go faster.

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#2922012 2-Jun-2022 17:41

@rugrat What about the other ISP costs going up like power / staff wages / rent on work locations etc...you think they should cover all those on cheap as chips broadband?

rugrat

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#2922017 2-Jun-2022 17:56

Linux: rugrat What about the other ISP costs going up like power / staff wages / rent on work locations etc...you think they should cover all those on cheap as chips broadband?

Is a 100% plus increase necessary for this though? Also unlike a plumber where it’s one person to one customer, they are more like mass production where it is 1 person to many customers. I.e. Not every customer is ringing at once, and when someone doesn’t ring still get money from them.
i.e If a business makes a 100 units an hour per employee, if the employees wages go up 6%, price of thing they are making only needs to go up by 0.06% to cover employees wage increase component, not the full 6% wage increase.

Of course it will need to go up by more then .06% to cover other cost increases, but I just don’t see 100% plus.

Edit: Any way if they all up it by $10, can only grumble and pay. If don’t can shop around. I note part of reason for cost increase is more data being used in pipes, guess that’s the trade off with having unlimited data, it’s not user pays, but an advantage is no bill shock.

seeby

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#2923525 7-Jun-2022 12:53

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

www.voyager.co.nz

mdf

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#2923530 7-Jun-2022 13:17

Appreciate the insights. I am a very happy Voyager customer - you have the best call centre I have ever dealt with, appreciate the willingness to engage on GZ (hat tip to @vygrnetworkmonkey), and the speed and reliability of the service is great.

While I'm not exactly thrilled about price increases, I absolutely understand it is necessary in the current environment to ensure a premium service. I'm also quite a fan of your pricing model that suits me (IPv6 and one off charge for a static IPv4 address) and it doesn't have subtle vendor lock ins.

Once again, the old adage of picking 2 of 3 of quality, speed and cost applies. I'm very happy paying extra for the other two.

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