richms:

 

Good, since they will have more calls about faults with copper and people in NZ are so averse to paying for customer service and expect it all to be "free" - this should help with the people that wont go away and call every time it rains with a fault that spark have to log to chorus who then delay it till it is dry to go and look at it, all the time spark are providing mobile data to the customer.

 

Its not just about the port costs that chorus bill the ISPs. Hope the others follow along with the charges.

 

I think I'm gonna have to call BS on this.  Spark has almost 50% of its broadband customers now on fibre and wireless.  This means that there are less calls about faults given the decreasing number of copper connections cf previous years.  Therefore there should be fewer fault calls not more, costs should be decreasing and Sparks should be making cost savings from having to deal with fewer issues rather than more (an efficient operator would).  It is inconceivable that Spark has $20m higher costs per annum that need to be recovered from a decreasing base - the need to have 200 more CSR's flies in the face of common sense.  It would be in Sparks best interest to try to migrate those fault-prone-customers by targeted discounts for migration not penalising the entire residual base. 

If anyone is experiencing cost increases it would be Chorus given the need to maintain the entire copper network over a smaller number of copper connections.  And until decommissioning of copper starts it will only increase further, right?

Furthermore Spark has publicly stated the cost savings from having customers move from copper to fibre/wireless in terms of the cost to use Chorus' network.  So there should be even more cost savings across the broadband group - and an efficient operator should be able to offset any (and I dont believe there are) cost increases from the copper broadband customers.

This smacks of nothing more than bully-boy corporate behaviour especially for those with no option to migrate off copper.  There could be 120,000 households that will not get fibre in the medium/longterm.  Are they going to see constant prices rises or does Spark just want to shed those to another operator?

Rather than increase prices perhaps moving to a user pays option for the unnecessary (and for many unwanted) "freebies" that are bundled into Sparks plans?  There have got to be lots of cost savings to be made there.