500plan to unlimited

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MrJonathanNZ

54 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 24

#160358 3-Jan-2015 22:06

If I go from the 500GB plan to the unlimited plan am I going to notice a decrease in speeds or streaming ability?
I know I'm asking a very general question as it will no doubt involve technical details that I am unaware of, I am just concerned that my current subscription has trouble watching streaming on a pc and iPad with a phone browsing facebook at the moment.
I'd hate to move for the unlimited and end up being limited not by data but an inability to watch streams (twitch, youtube etc.)

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Talkiet

4819 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 3934

Trusted

#1227435 2-Feb-2015 09:40

I've avoided making too many comments on this thread because I thought it would work itself out when the T&C changes got made over the weekend but no.

Paulbags... Stop worrying. Read the headlines. The traffic management never applied to the plans and there's no intent to apply it to any of the plans.

The text it sounds like you're most worried about is this:

"In addition to our right to change, withhold, suspend, restrict, replace or terminate any of our Broadband Services under the Residential Customer Terms and Conditions, we may, at our sole discretion, change, withhold, suspend, restrict, replace or terminate any of our Broadband Services where, for example, systems or the network are being maintained or otherwise worked on, unavailable or must be protected, to manage network traffic or access to network services (for example, to manage peer to peer traffic types), to improve functionality and attributes of the Broadband Services, or for any other reason we think makes it necessary or desirable to do so."

I'll paraphrase it in a non legally binding but hopefully understandable way for you and everyone else....

"We can cut you off for any reason, but we'll basically only do that if you're being infected/acting as a spam relay/attack vector, and even then, only until that's fixed. We might do some traffic shaping if sh1t has gone down and there's been a huge capacity disruption due to a failure or unplanned disruption or act of God. Mind you, we're leaving a catchall here as well because, well, that's an operationally necessary catch-all to have"

I'm not saying that we'll NEVER do shaping because anyone that says that about their services is LYING and they can't be sure it'll never be required. I AM saying (as the person that did a lot of the traffic profiling on the unlimited plans and showed that the unlimited customer base were materially different than the Go Large and Bigtime userbase) that there are no current plans to introduce any traffic shaping in the forseeable future for any of our plans.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

SparkNZ

31 posts

Geek
+1 received by user: 43

Trusted

Spark NZ

#1227444 2-Feb-2015 09:56

PaulBags: They promised:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1548477165436020&set=p.1548477165436020

And then they left the policy more-or-less in place (dated 1 February Version 3 at time of posting):
https://store.spark.co.nz/internet/page/adslbroadbandoffersummary/#traffic-management

And "to manage network traffic" is still explicitly cited as a reason to restrict traffic in the verbose legal terms (dated 24 July 2013 and time of posting):
http://www.spark.co.nz/help/other/terms/broadband/#5.ChangingwithholdingsuspendingrestrictingreplacingorterminatingServices

I suppose I'm expecting a bit much for a Sunday, but so far I'm unimpressed with what so far appears to be un-backed up marketing speak.

Hi Paul, Everything in the Facebook post you've linked is correct - we are officially removing Traffic Management from our Ts&Cs. We haven't used the policy to-date, it was only ever intended as a last-resort, just-in-case backup plan, and when it became apparent we'd not actually need to use it (because we're investing millions into our network), we made the decision to drop it completely.

The only reason the website hasn't been updated is that we've got a load of changes to get pushed through, and it's more efficient if we push them out all at the same time rather than making continual incremental changes - as you can probably imagine it's quite a process!

This scheduled work is actually due to be completed today! Apologies for the confusion, but it's definitely not un-backed up marking speak

Cheers! ^Sam

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