Rural broadband 4g 700mhz

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#1357948 3-Aug-2015 16:20

coffeebaron: Most likely Spark's B315 will have 3G bands 2100+850. Vodafone has 3G 2100+900

From the above documents posted by Firefuze, it looks like Spark's version has no 3G support at all. Makes sense that they don't let you select it then...

coffeebaron

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#1357975 3-Aug-2015 16:42

grant_k:
coffeebaron: Most likely Spark's B315 will have 3G bands 2100+850. Vodafone has 3G 2100+900

From the above documents posted by Firefuze, it looks like Spark's version has no 3G support at all. Makes sense that they don't let you select it then...

Would be interesting to see if they sell this router standalone.

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ablears

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#1358765 4-Aug-2015 15:34

grant_k:
That's the problem with Spark's service; there aren't any resellers, and no plans that I've heard of to include any. I spent part of Saturday driving around the Bay of Islands and testing Vodafone's 4G service at various locations on 700, 1800 and 2600MHz. The speed is absolutely brilliant so long as you have a reasonable signal.

As you mentioned, Ultimate resells Vodafone and also offers Static IPs @ no charge.

I spoke to Vodafone's customer service team to get an idea of latency on the 4G 700Mhz service. They told me:

'We can't guarantee the latency as a difinitive figure, so if you do a speed test on your mobile phone's mobile data, this will be very close to what you will receive with RBI. We do believe that it will affect such features as HD video calls via Skype/Hangouts and quite noticeably, online gaming.'

... which surprised me a bit. What's your experience with latency on Ultimate? Would it differ from Vodafone?

grant_k

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#1358848 4-Aug-2015 17:08

ablears:
grant_k:
That's the problem with Spark's service; there aren't any resellers, and no plans that I've heard of to include any. I spent part of Saturday driving around the Bay of Islands and testing Vodafone's 4G service at various locations on 700, 1800 and 2600MHz. The speed is absolutely brilliant so long as you have a reasonable signal.

As you mentioned, Ultimate resells Vodafone and also offers Static IPs @ no charge.

I spoke to Vodafone's customer service team to get an idea of latency on the 4G 700Mhz service. They told me:

'We can't guarantee the latency as a difinitive figure, so if you do a speed test on your mobile phone's mobile data, this will be very close to what you will receive with RBI. We do believe that it will affect such features as HD video calls via Skype/Hangouts and quite noticeably, online gaming.'

... which surprised me a bit. What's your experience with latency on Ultimate? Would it differ from Vodafone?

My son plays online games a lot, and he does notice a slightly increased latency compared to the fibre connection he had in Auckland. However, given that most of the gaming servers are in the US, an extra 30ms or so compared to fibre doesn't make a whole lot of difference when the total delay is of the order of 200ms. Lower pings are always better of course, but given our rural location, the RBI services are not too bad -- especially 4G.

Latency on Ultimate is pretty much identical to Vodafone as you would expect.

Skype calls work brilliantly over 4G, with a noticeable improvement compared to 3G.

staticnz

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#1359596 5-Aug-2015 18:18

Has anyone else managed to get Spark's wireless broadband up and running?

Jase2985

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#1359637 5-Aug-2015 20:07

staticnz: Has anyone else managed to get Spark's wireless broadband up and running?

there were a couple of posts somewhere on here were people have got sparks connection.

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JoeJoe

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#1359803 6-Aug-2015 08:41

Perhaps getting a little off topic, but after struggling with very slow rural ADSL for the last few months, pretty much always below 1 Mbps and often down at 0.1-0.4 Mbps after school and in the evenings, I was therefore very interested in the new 4G 700 service. In the past for some years we had been at 0.7-1.5 Mbps depending on time of day, but recent months had seen a steady incremental slowing.

However, seeing on the webpage that we couldn't have 4G 700, I presume only because Spark thinks we already had "fast" ADSL as other addresses in our rural bay of Plenty road that the website didn't think had fast ADSl are able to order the new service, I ended up putting in a fault call to Spark business (it's a business line), expecting they might at least be able to return us to our former 0.7-1.5 Mbps, but lo and behold, after two days (on and off) of I suspect major work in the cabinet at end of our road by a man in a Chorus van, we are now suddenly on what seems to be a virtually constant 7-8 Mbps downstream speed at any time of day, with no apparent slowing due to varying load up our road, so none of the previously ever-present after school and weekend slow down we used to get!

When I put the fault call in and the cheeky sod from Spark business broadband I spoke to suggested I might like to change my Vodafone mobile to a Spark one, I reacted with "You've got to be joking with the service level we have been having from you guys recently. Give us a decent service for long enough to convince me, and then I could at least think about it, but to be honest, right now I'm thinking more along the lines of changing everything over to Vodafone or some small outfit and abandoning Spark altogether." Anyway, something has worked as a result, as we now have three days later what seems to me to be pretty decent rural 7-8 Mbps downstream ADSL and ping of about 20 ms to nearby test servers, which right now is enough to keep me happy. I'll probably still look to upgrade to 4g 700 sometime later if they'll let me.

Anyway the old principle of the squeaky wheel getting some attention may have worked, as over about four days I did online chat with Spark twice about trying to change either to 4g 700 or faster DSL, and telling them we did not have what any sensible person could call fast ADSL as their website thought we did, and then finally the fault call, which turned into more than one other call and chat with Spark business broadband people, and a few days later we have an utterly different and seemingly much better service in place. I'm assuming all the ADSL subscribers up our road will be benefiting from the change. When I spoke to a local Chorus technician just a couple of months back he said they had no plans to upgrade the cabinet at the end of our road in the near future.

Another thing that happened as the work was being done is the Spark website changed from saying we could have VDSL if we wanted it, to now saying we can't have VDSL (all the Spark people I spoke to said that the website saying we could have VDSL here was always wrong), an now says we can only have fast ADSL. Chorus' coverage map now says there is a planned upgrade to availability of >20Mbps wired service by 2016 at this address.

Cheers.

firefuze

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#1367390 16-Aug-2015 12:31

Spark have removed the 700Mhz restriction now, Rural Broadband can be used on 1800/2600 aswell

eXDee

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#1367406 16-Aug-2015 13:39

So with it more widely available, is a sim card from one of these things locked to the device? Can you pull it out and start roaming with it in a mobile phone or hotspot? Have they locked the usage of it to specific transmitters in your area etc?
Curious if anyone knows of the restrictions - 80gb 4G data for $99 im sure appeals to many.

grant_k

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#1367407 16-Aug-2015 13:42

eXDee: So with it more widely available, is a sim card from one of these things locked to the device? Can you pull it out and start roaming with it in a mobile phone or hotspot? Have they locked the usage of it to specific transmitters in your area etc?
Curious if anyone knows of the restrictions - 80gb 4G data for $99 im sure appeals to many.

Vodafone have TAC-locked their SIMs to the devices, so you cannot use any device which is not on their approved list.

I have no idea if Spark do the same, but their T&Cs for mobile broadband have words to the effect that "If we become aware that your device is being used in locations other than the installation address, we may terminate the service". Not verbatim, but if you trawl through the T&Cs you'll find that clause.

DIYDan

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#1372416 23-Aug-2015 12:12

We're Tuatapere Southland, and Woosh has been our only option for many years. With 0.1mpbs; after 11pm it can creep up to 0.2mbps. Times have changed; internet is part of how we work and play; these speeds are just too slow.

The last few months Woosh has been having a lot of connection problems and locals are struggling to stay connected. They may even have turned off our local Woosh tower; I noticed someone who got connected a month ago, they has their antenna pointing in the other direction. I think Woosh is dying a slow death. No more signal strength on the website, the closing of our local Woosh shop and the loss of signal our the last 2 weeks.

Vodafone has a good 3G service and a lot of people in Southland are moving from Woosh to Vodafone or thinking of doing so. I've contacted Spark a couple of months back about if and when the 4G will be in our area; but no one is willing to give out any information. I'm about 3 months away from signing up with Vodafone myself. I would be willing to wait, if only I knew how long it will be before we have 4G. I know about 10 other people who are with Woosh and everyone including myself will be signing with Vodafone, if Spark don't tell us something in the next few months.

Once a lot of these people sign up with Vodafone, Spark will struggle to get them to move over. All we're looking for is a 6/12/18/24 month time frame for our area.

With the troubles Woosh are having, now is a good time for spark to fit their 4G gear into our cell tower and collect all those customers. If you're listening Spark, come over next week, I'll put the jug on!

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#1372484 23-Aug-2015 14:05

Wow Woosh are really bad there now huh? Did they say why their shop closed (I didn't even know they had them)?
Have they contacted you about the recent changes with their company?

grant_k

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#1372491 23-Aug-2015 14:53

DIYDan: Vodafone has a good 3G service and a lot of people in Southland are moving from Woosh to Vodafone or thinking of doing so. I've contacted Spark a couple of months back about if and when the 4G will be in our area; but no one is willing to give out any information. I'm about 3 months away from signing up with Vodafone myself. I would be willing to wait, if only I knew how long it will be before we have 4G. I know about 10 other people who are with Woosh and everyone including myself will be signing with Vodafone, if Spark don't tell us something in the next few months.

Once a lot of these people sign up with Vodafone, Spark will struggle to get them to move over. All we're looking for is a 6/12/18/24 month time frame for our area.

Vodafone is not the only game in town if you have a good 3G signal from them. Ultimate Broadband will give you much better service and they also offer 50GB of extra off-peak data with their plans (or more in some cases):

Ultimate Broadband RBI plans

benmurphy66

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#1372492 23-Aug-2015 15:00

grant_k:
DIYDan: Vodafone has a good 3G service and a lot of people in Southland are moving from Woosh to Vodafone or thinking of doing so. I've contacted Spark a couple of months back about if and when the 4G will be in our area; but no one is willing to give out any information. I'm about 3 months away from signing up with Vodafone myself. I would be willing to wait, if only I knew how long it will be before we have 4G. I know about 10 other people who are with Woosh and everyone including myself will be signing with Vodafone, if Spark don't tell us something in the next few months.

Once a lot of these people sign up with Vodafone, Spark will struggle to get them to move over. All we're looking for is a 6/12/18/24 month time frame for our area.

Vodafone is not the only game in town if you have a good 3G signal from them. Ultimate Broadband will give you much better service and they also offer 50GB of extra off-peak data with their plans (or more in some cases):

Ultimate Broadband RBI plans

I have just signed up for ultimate broadband and would highly recommend them. There service while I had some questions was awesome, and then signed up and had an issues but they got it sorted with a few hours on Friday night. Performance wise I get between 40-70 meg down and at least 25 meg up. Pretty happy thus far at day 3. I would recommend ultimate broadband for value and service

DIYDan

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#1372498 23-Aug-2015 15:20

benmurphy66:
grant_k:
DIYDan: Vodafone has a good 3G service and a lot of people in Southland are moving from Woosh to Vodafone or thinking of doing so. I've contacted Spark a couple of months back about if and when the 4G will be in our area; but no one is willing to give out any information. I'm about 3 months away from signing up with Vodafone myself. I would be willing to wait, if only I knew how long it will be before we have 4G. I know about 10 other people who are with Woosh and everyone including myself will be signing with Vodafone, if Spark don't tell us something in the next few months.

Once a lot of these people sign up with Vodafone, Spark will struggle to get them to move over. All we're looking for is a 6/12/18/24 month time frame for our area.

Vodafone is not the only game in town if you have a good 3G signal from them. Ultimate Broadband will give you much better service and they also offer 50GB of extra off-peak data with their plans (or more in some cases):

Ultimate Broadband RBI plans

I have just signed up for ultimate broadband and would highly recommend them. There service while I had some questions was awesome, and then signed up and had an issues but they got it sorted with a few hours on Friday night. Performance wise I get between 40-70 meg down and at least 25 meg up. Pretty happy thus far at day 3. I would recommend ultimate broadband for value and service

Thanks for the info guys. Ultimate broadband looks like a good option on 3G; with the option to move to 4G when it becomes available. Myself and a few others, might just be giving them a call next week. The 50Gb off peak is a bonus too.

I wonder which network they use Vodafone or Spark?

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