Spark Ultra Fast Fibre MAX performance and discussion (Some might say Gigabit)

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Talkiet

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#205890 1-Dec-2016 09:19

So now it's launched we can talk a bit more about it. I'll repost the press release here to start with...

Spark customers can now buy Ultra Fast Fibre MAX, a broadband service delivered over gigabit technology. This new broadband plan option is now the fastest residential broadband service available from Spark.

Spark’s Fibre MAX uses a gigabit connection over the UFB (Ultra Fast Broadband) network. The actual speed a customer will get varies based on a number of factors. For instance, to get the fastest speeds possible, customers will need to have high specification hardware in their homes and be testing over an Ethernet connection.

When used in optimal conditions, Ultra Fast Fibre MAX should provide speeds of between 700Mbps and 900Mbps download / 400Mbps upload. In trials, even higher speeds have been achieved, of up to 930Mbps.

Ultra Fast Fibre MAX can now be purchased nationwide for consumer and business addresses where the Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) network is available – with a few exceptions. Services are not yet available in Queenstown, Greymouth, Oamaru or Whakatane until further notice, as work is being undertaken to ensure that the network is ready to support Ultra Fast Fibre MAX speeds. Otherwise, any customer with UFB available can purchase Ultra Fast Fibre Max: availability can be checked using Spark’s address checker.

Customers can purchase a bundled broadband and home phone Fibre MAX plan with unlimited data for $149.99/ month – or a broadband only Fibre MAX plan with unlimited data for $139.99/ month. Businesses can purchase a bundled broadband and landline Fibre MAX plan with unlimited data for $212.85 ex GST – or a broadband only Fibre MAX plan with unlimited data for $179.85 ex GST.

All consumer Spark Ultra Fibre plans come with: Lightbox on us – online TV; Spark Security Suite - 5 free McAfee Security licenses; email - free Xtra email service; 24/7 help and support - over the phone and online, including a live webchat service; and lots more benefits for Spark customers including Spark Thanks and 1GB a day Free Public WiFi. See www.spark.co.nz/getmore for details.

I've had a couple of lines installed at my place for testing and performance has been amazing. I just got this now.

But of course that will vary for many people. I got that on a kickass i7 with stacks of RAM, an intel gigabit card, connected directly to the Spark supplied HG659b (which BTW has given us better results in testing than ANY other router we've tried) and using Chrome with an adblocker enabled.

When I tried my Surface Pro 3 (i5/8GB) connected via a USB3 gig adaptor, I got 600/400.

Got any questions? Wanna show off your speeds? Go for it!

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.

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#1680557 1-Dec-2016 09:54

Oh, I'd also like to say a good word about our friends at Enable for the install... Living at the end of a 100 metre driveway with no continuous fence to tack anything to, I was skeptical that I would ever be able to get fibre here but everything went unbelievably smoothly. The other three owners sharing the driveway all gave their written permission in a couple of days and Enable's contractors turned up when they said they would for the scoping and civil work (except for the start of civils when they turned up early and just did the tarmac cuts). The installer himself was on time, very professional and completed the install to a very high standard taking into account my requests for where to run the fibre etc. Couldn't have gone any better.

My driveway, from near my house, looking out to the road. The road is about 100 metres away!

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.

CNZ

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#1680559 1-Dec-2016 09:55

It could be interesting to see how fast it goes with aftermarket and enterprise gear (My Router USG-PRO-4)

Even on Fiber 200plus i regularly hit 24MB/s for over a minute of course I don't expect to get over 1Gbps on a CAT5e Connection

[URL=https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3558175835][IMG]https://www.speedtest.net/result/3558175835.png[/IMG][/URL]

Talkiet

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#1680566 1-Dec-2016 10:01

CNZ:

It could be interesting to see how fast it goes with aftermarket and enterprise gear (My Router USG-PRO-4)

Even on Fiber 200plus i regularly hit 24MB/s for over a minute of course I don't expect to get over 1Gbps on a CAT5e Connection

Be interested to see and I am sure there is a lot of stuff out there that will support it at full speed but in testing we found the best results came from our own HG659b router. It's not the highest spec in terms of featureset, but it is pretty decent in that space and it gave us the best performance. We tried some of the usual suspects in the consumer market for "higher end" routers. Sorry I'm not able to give out results, but we didn't do detailed testing with the other routers - just basic functional testing... Publishing any sort of test results where I'm not extremely confident in the methodology would be irresponsible. I will say we didn't find any that gave really bad performance.

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.

NonprayingMantis

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#1680589 1-Dec-2016 10:43

Nice.

Who is this 'max' person and why does he insist on putting his name on so many different products?
Spark fibre, Pepsi, Office etc.

Otagolad

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#1680629 1-Dec-2016 11:39

Keen to get this - as a current 200/200 customer I'm concerned it could take months to be upgraded (see other thread) - surely your existing customers take priority and should be forced to do an upgrade request. Also, if Spark knew an upgrade request would be required, why didn't you let us do that weeks ago so we'd be on Ultra Fast Fibre MAX from day one?

Talkiet

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#1680647 1-Dec-2016 12:07

Otagolad:

Keen to get this - as a current 200/200 customer I'm concerned it could take months to be upgraded (see other thread) - surely your existing customers take priority and should be forced to do an upgrade request. Also, if Spark knew an upgrade request would be required, why didn't you let us do that weeks ago so we'd be on Ultra Fast Fibre MAX from day one?

Anyone already on 200/200 is probably not a typical user and I wouldn't think going through the upgrade process would be to onerous. I have checked and doing the upgrade won't extend your contract length/start a new contract (your concern from the other thread).

Of course since you already have fibre and a gig capable router, the upgrade won't require a visit - just a service order in our system and one in the LFC. A few days...

We released the product once we were happy with the network performance and the systems to support it. If we had waited to also do the migration strategy and planning for existing customers, we'd not have released the FibreMAX product yet - I personally think this is a better decision than waiting for that to be sorted too.

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.

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Talkiet

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#1680682 1-Dec-2016 13:29

To make things a little faster for testing, I have had some direct URLs made for our three speedtest.net servers...

http://sparkauckland.speedtest.net

http://sparkwellington.speedtest.net

http://sparkchristchurch.speedtest.net

Click on one of those and it will preselect the server and then you need to press the RIGHT button (BEGIN TEST - your preferred server) and it will run the test.

For the moment, please consider that the speedtest.net links are better optimised for this testing than the spark.co.nz/speedtest site.

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.

surfisup1000

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#1680687 1-Dec-2016 13:36

I was checking out the truenet figures for latency...

https://truenet.nz/nz-latency

Spark latency doesn't look as good. I wonder if it is the case with the new service.

Talkiet

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#1680688 1-Dec-2016 13:40

surfisup1000:

I was checking out the truenet figures for latency...

https://truenet.nz/nz-latency

Spark latency doesn't look as good. I wonder if it is the case with the new service.

I believe those figures could be explained by a detailed examination of the Truenet methodology and distribution of their volunteer probes. I'm unable to make any further public comment. I believe our service is spectacularly good and knowing what I know, if I was made redundant tomorrow and had to pay for my own internet connection, it would be Spark every time (even above Bigpipe FWIW)

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.

surfisup1000

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#1680691 1-Dec-2016 13:56

Talkiet:

I believe those figures could be explained by a detailed examination of the Truenet methodology and distribution of their volunteer probes. I'm unable to make any further public comment. I believe our service is spectacularly good and knowing what I know, if I was made redundant tomorrow and had to pay for my own internet connection, it would be Spark every time (even above Bigpipe FWIW)

Cheers - N

Thx, I understand, and reading between the lines maybe spark are in some discussions with truenet.

Regardless, this is my current ping to the nz herald site....(2degrees 100/50 UFB/wired)....

C:\WINDOWS\system32>ping www.nzherald.co.nz

Pinging w1.apnnz.com [203.99.69.23] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 203.99.69.23: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=58
Reply from 203.99.69.23: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=58
Reply from 203.99.69.23: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=58
Reply from 203.99.69.23: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=58

Pretty fantastic speeds, hard to know if spark would be similar (some online gaming going on in our house haha).

Are there any spark UFB customers in the tauranga area able to post some 'ping' results via a wired connection ? Highly unscientific ,but this is the kind of thing truenet was supposed to show.

DjShadow

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#1680692 1-Dec-2016 14:00

Talkiet:

To make things a little faster for testing, I have had some direct URLs made for our three speedtest.net servers...

http://sparkauckland.speedtest.net

http://sparkwellington.speedtest.net

http://sparkchristchurch.speedtest.net

Click on one of those and it will preselect the server and then you need to press the RIGHT button (BEGIN TEST - your preferred server) and it will run the test.

For the moment, please consider that the speedtest.net links are better optimised for this testing than the spark.co.nz/speedtest site.

Cheers - N

All 3 of those point to Auckland?

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Talkiet

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#1680694 1-Dec-2016 14:07

DjShadow:

Talkiet:

To make things a little faster for testing, I have had some direct URLs made for our three speedtest.net servers...

http://sparkauckland.speedtest.net

http://sparkwellington.speedtest.net

http://sparkchristchurch.speedtest.net

Click on one of those and it will preselect the server and then you need to press the RIGHT button (BEGIN TEST - your preferred server) and it will run the test.

For the moment, please consider that the speedtest.net links are better optimised for this testing than the spark.co.nz/speedtest site.

Cheers - N

All 3 of those point to Auckland?

Thanks for that. The editor here on GZ allowed me to change the cut and pasted URL but didn't change the underlying link! I have edited the original post to be correct now.

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.

Batman

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#1680695 1-Dec-2016 14:08

Talkiet:

So now it's launched we can talk a bit more about it. I'll repost the press release here to start with...

Spark customers can now buy Ultra Fast Fibre MAX, a broadband service delivered over gigabit technology. This new broadband plan option is now the fastest residential broadband service available from Spark.

Spark’s Fibre MAX uses a gigabit connection over the UFB (Ultra Fast Broadband) network. The actual speed a customer will get varies based on a number of factors. For instance, to get the fastest speeds possible, customers will need to have high specification hardware in their homes and be testing over an Ethernet connection.

When used in optimal conditions, Ultra Fast Fibre MAX should provide speeds of between 700Mbps and 900Mbps download / 400Mbps upload. In trials, even higher speeds have been achieved, of up to 930Mbps.

Ultra Fast Fibre MAX can now be purchased nationwide for consumer and business addresses where the Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) network is available – with a few exceptions. Services are not yet available in Queenstown, Greymouth, Oamaru or Whakatane until further notice, as work is being undertaken to ensure that the network is ready to support Ultra Fast Fibre MAX speeds. Otherwise, any customer with UFB available can purchase Ultra Fast Fibre Max: availability can be checked using Spark’s address checker.

Customers can purchase a bundled broadband and home phone Fibre MAX plan with unlimited data for $149.99/ month – or a broadband only Fibre MAX plan with unlimited data for $139.99/ month. Businesses can purchase a bundled broadband and landline Fibre MAX plan with unlimited data for $212.85 ex GST – or a broadband only Fibre MAX plan with unlimited data for $179.85 ex GST.

All consumer Spark Ultra Fibre plans come with: Lightbox on us – online TV; Spark Security Suite - 5 free McAfee Security licenses; email - free Xtra email service; 24/7 help and support - over the phone and online, including a live webchat service; and lots more benefits for Spark customers including Spark Thanks and 1GB a day Free Public WiFi. See www.spark.co.nz/getmore for details.

I've had a couple of lines installed at my place for testing and performance has been amazing. I just got this now.

But of course that will vary for many people. I got that on a kickass i7 with stacks of RAM, an intel gigabit card, connected directly to the Spark supplied HG659b (which BTW has given us better results in testing than ANY other router we've tried) and using Chrome with an adblocker enabled.

When I tried my Surface Pro 3 (i5/8GB) connected via a USB3 gig adaptor, I got 600/400.

Got any questions? Wanna show off your speeds? Go for it!

Cheers - N

Haha wait till all your neighbours have it, then it won't be so amazing :(

Correct me if wrong - [Deducing by some noticable real world speed drop during peak hours ;p]

Batman

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#1680697 1-Dec-2016 14:09

Talkiet:

Oh, I'd also like to say a good word about our friends at Enable for the install... Living at the end of a 100 metre driveway with no continuous fence to tack anything to, I was skeptical that I would ever be able to get fibre here but everything went unbelievably smoothly. The other three owners sharing the driveway all gave their written permission in a couple of days and Enable's contractors turned up when they said they would for the scoping and civil work (except for the start of civils when they turned up early and just did the tarmac cuts). The installer himself was on time, very professional and completed the install to a very high standard taking into account my requests for where to run the fibre etc. Couldn't have gone any better.

My driveway, from near my house, looking out to the road. The road is about 100 metres away!

How come you get special treatment with the trench dig while the rest of us just gets it stapled to the fence?

Batman

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#1680698 1-Dec-2016 14:10

Talkiet:

To make things a little faster for testing, I have had some direct URLs made for our three speedtest.net servers...

http://sparkauckland.speedtest.net

http://sparkwellington.speedtest.net

http://sparkchristchurch.speedtest.net

Click on one of those and it will preselect the server and then you need to press the RIGHT button (BEGIN TEST - your preferred server) and it will run the test.

For the moment, please consider that the speedtest.net links are better optimised for this testing than the spark.co.nz/speedtest site.

Cheers - N

Just wondering, how much data is transferred per each test? [Curious]

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