Telecom - I do doubt your integrity!

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Telecom - I do doubt your integrity!

pystol

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#69077 3-Oct-2010 00:45

You close our Big Time accounts because a mighty outfit such as yourselves is pitifully unable to control some super-excessive downloaders - that's your story, at least. You then offer us 40gb accounts for $20 MORE than we were paying for unlimited downloading - . We supposedly get faster speed although I must admit I don't require it and quite often I'm not sure I even get it.

You then offer Double-Data accounts to new customers.

I'm sure everything can be reasonably explained ....no wait .... I sure it can not be. I'm listening.

(Moderator edit: removed offensive language)

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30 posts

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#387272 3-Oct-2010 07:27

Your sentiments are exactly how I felt about this issue. I could understand why Telecom felt it necessary to withdraw the Big Time plan and even reluctantly accept the miserable offer of 20gb on pro. What made me move was the double data offer to new customers. I had been with Telecom for ever with my landline, my family had 5 XT cellphones and we had their unlimited internet plan through both misjudged plans. This all counted for nothing and I could not even be offered double data for 6 months like the unknown new customers they were hoping to reel in.

Well stuff you Telecom .. I changed to VF and am paying $85 a month for landline and 30gb (if you count the $15 off my mysky) and am reasonably happy with it. The irony is I probably would have stayed with Telecom on 20gb for $100 but for the arrogance of them thinking the better offer for new customers would not upset me enough to prompt me to change. It was not their miserable product offer that chased me away, it was their arrogance.

freitasm

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#387278 3-Oct-2010 08:21

I had thought the whole Big Time was discussed at lenght in other threads - seriously the Big Time problems thread is now the second longest here on Geekzone. Telecom people explained a lot there.

It all comes down to economics. You can't expect a company to keep providing a service that is not working as they intended.

It happens all the times. When I used to go to the Gold Lounge in the cinema they used to have free drinks and popcorn - they don't anymore. You can complain, but it won't come back...

NZCrusader

646 posts

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#387505 3-Oct-2010 22:48

The removal of go large , then big time, with no suitable replacement plan, left us in the dark too, and caused us to leave telecom. ( which we did not really want to do )

I do know that the unlimited plans did not work as they intended. But they decided to kick everyone off, rather than remove the offenders / abusers. The only bit of relief given was no termination fee, which still left us searching & in the dark looking for a new provider.

Still sad about the whole thing, but whats done is done. I just hope it was a good maneuver cost wise or public relations...

robbyp

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#387508 3-Oct-2010 22:56

NZCrusader: The removal of go large , then big time, with no suitable replacement plan, left us in the dark too, and caused us to leave telecom. ( which we did not really want to do )

I do know that the unlimited plans did not work as they intended. But they decided to kick everyone off, rather than remove the offenders / abusers. The only bit of relief given was no termination fee, which still left us searching & in the dark looking for a new provider.

Still sad about the whole thing, but whats done is done. I just hope it was a good maneuver cost wise or public relations...

There are at least 2 other companies who are offering supposed unlimited internet, so there is nothing stopping you moving to them. Companies change their terms and plans all the time.

Detruire

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#387512 3-Oct-2010 23:49

There are things suck as performance and customer support that are very good reason to stay away from all the other ISPs I know of with "unlimited" plans.

rm *

1080p

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#387572 4-Oct-2010 10:12

I'm still a little dark on why ISPs do not offer costlier 'unlimited' plans. I understand most users for broadband will not need/want to spend hundreds of dollars per month on bandwidth but there is obviously a market for some who will.

I understand that it is costly to provide international transit for the leeches but if you were to have a plan that catered to that kind of usage and charge $250+ per month for it then surely it might be more viable for your business. This is especially aimed at the very large ISPs who are able to purchase transit at a much lower price than other ISPs (I'm thinking of one incumbent who actually owns some of the cable...) and the ones with caching servers.

There is almost no option above ~200GB from what i can see (unless you want to purchase data blocks/pay per MB). I'm thinking something like three plans with a soft cap at ~500GB, ~750GB and ~1TB with scaled prices would be a start.

freitasm

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#387575 4-Oct-2010 10:15

I am on a 120GB plan with TelstraClear and pay $229/month. Do you think other ISPs would be able to offer a 500GB or 1TB at any price point people would pay?

Look at it this way: people wanting a 1TB consumer plan are most likely downloading pirated content. They are not people that are fan of paying for things, are they?

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raab

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#387581 4-Oct-2010 10:33

I think Telecom need to update their plans after 2 years since the last update?

40GB as the largest option seems a bit ridiculous given the plethora of online streaming options these days

Mind you I could pay $160 in over usage charges to get 120GB/mth

boby55

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#387583 4-Oct-2010 10:38

raab: I think Telecom need to update their plans after 2 years since the last update?

40GB as the largest option seems a bit ridiculous given the plethora of online streaming options these days

Mind you I could pay $160 in over usage charges to get 120GB/mth

If your spending $160 a month in over charges, Maybe you should look at a Telecom Business Plan,

They have higher Data Cap and Lower Overage Price.

https://www.telecombusinesshub.co.nz/Internet/Broadband/Pages/Pricing.aspx

Edit: Woot! 1000 Posts :D

raab

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#387584 4-Oct-2010 10:41

Yeah I have been looking at the business plans but I'm not sure I can get it given my partner works at Gen-i so we get Total Home + Pro plan for free

And given the above we're not eligible for the 80gb promo either :|

k1wi

484 posts

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#387594 4-Oct-2010 11:22

I'm not entirely sure how ISPs in Australia are managing to move towards 1TB consumer plans, with unlimited, unmetered upload traffic. They must have a lot more domestic traffic than us.

freitasm, I do take issue at the suggestion people wanting a 1TB plan are most likely downloading pirated content. Perhaps 4 years ago this was the case, but the amount of legal and free content, TVNZ OnDemand, YouTube, hell, even Facebook games that are available to consumers now (many of these are being hosted, or at least cached locally), is such that you can easily surpass 120GBs doing so. Let alone the 20 on Telecom's largest capped plan. This is particularly the case if you are living in a house with more than a couple householders over the age of 10. It was these users who were hit hard by the loss of Bigtime. They were also the users who appreciated the 'freedom' of not having to pay constant attention to their data usage for fear of going over their cap before the end of their billing month. They may only use 50 or 70GB a month, but appreciate that extra buffer available with a larger cap.

I was not surprised at the change in my own personal data 'behaviour' following the end of Big Time. I ended up cutting back on national and local traffic (say, monitoring my webserver remotely when at work) and stopped all of my Ubuntu and other [b]very legal[/b] torrents. I am not using euphemisms here for illegal content - I had utorrent configured to only accept NZ peers and always tried to download software updates and Ubuntu ISOs etc via torrents if available - thus trying to alleviate some of the demand from outside of NZ. My household now consumes most of our data during the evening peak.

Everytime Zynga tweak their games by the tiniest amount, it requires a full download of the applet. For Telecom with their cache system, they only need to get that applet from the US once every tweak, they can then feed it out to their users via their cache system. I'm not kidding when I say that Facebook games are the largest consumer of data each month in my household. I have seen the impact of the frequency of what I assume are minute updates on our data usage. Yet constantly we're told "it costs X dollars for every GB across the SCC, therefore, we have to charge what we charge".

Despite the roll out of the caching system, notably the Youtube cache, and publicised reductions in SCC costs, it has been well over 2 years since data caps have increased or prices reduced on Telecom. I would have thought the Big Time removal would have been an ideal time to reconsider their offered plans.

Finally, regarding the "why don't you change ISPs" question, the answer is simple. The only reason my family is still with Telecom after 5 years of being with them is because we use an Xtra email address. If I was providing a service and that was the only thing keeping a customer, I would be very disappointed.

I was told in a very stern manner that the reason why it would cost at least $10 a month is because it is a premium Yahoo! account. When I asked why they couldn't downgrade it to a free Yahoo! account, and offer it in turn for free I was never offered a reason. Yet TelstraClear has managed to continue to provide us with an incoming email service (no outgoing) with them since we left them for Telecom some 5 years ago. For no charge. And people still bloody send us email using that old address no matter how many times we tell them we have a new one!

k1wi

raab

262 posts

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#387599 4-Oct-2010 11:35

Maybe you should look at registering a .co.nz or .net.nz domain based on your surname and setup your own email with free services such as google hosted apps that way you won't be tied to an ISP email address

boby55

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#387615 4-Oct-2010 11:59

k1wi: I'm not entirely sure how ISPs in Australia are managing to move towards 1TB consumer plans, with unlimited, unmetered upload traffic. They must have a lot more domestic traffic than us.

freitasm, I do take issue at the suggestion people wanting a 1TB plan are most likely downloading pirated content. Perhaps 4 years ago this was the case, but the amount of legal and free content, TVNZ OnDemand, YouTube, hell, even Facebook games that are available to consumers now (many of these are being hosted, or at least cached locally), i

You have got to be kidding me? Even with a S**T load of Legal Content, (Open Source Torrents, Tv On Demand, Youtube), No way can that amount to 1TB of usage, The only logical way for a home user to use that much would be indeed pirating content.

Edit: But Yes, it would be nice to see a 120 - 200Gb Plan for users who do, do lots of the content mentioned above

freitasm

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#387619 4-Oct-2010 12:05

boby55:
k1wi: I'm not entirely sure how ISPs in Australia are managing to move towards 1TB consumer plans, with unlimited, unmetered upload traffic. They must have a lot more domestic traffic than us.

freitasm, I do take issue at the suggestion people wanting a 1TB plan are most likely downloading pirated content. Perhaps 4 years ago this was the case, but the amount of legal and free content, TVNZ OnDemand, YouTube, hell, even Facebook games that are available to consumers now (many of these are being hosted, or at least cached locally), i

You have got to be kidding me? Even with a S**T load of Legal Content, (Open Source Torrents, Tv On Demand, Youtube), No way can that amount to 1TB of usage, The only logical way for a home user to use that much would be indeed pirating content.

Edit: But Yes, it would be nice to see a 120 - 200Gb Plan for users who do, do lots of the content mentioned above

What he said.

I am on a 120GB plan. We buy one or two iTunes movies per week, I have mylaptop backup with Mozy (130GB up in the clouds currenly). both me and wife work from home, two VoIP lines, some gaming, downloading new games and patches from Steam, and the odd torrenting. And the max we went through was 130GB.

It's an impossibility to actually consume 1TB of content. It's a probably more hours of video to see than you have in a month.

I don't disagree that Australian ISPs do a great job of pushing the plans up. I am not saying plans shouldn't go up. The current crop of New Zealand ISPs offering 20GB and 40GB plans is bad for consumers. But I doubt people using 1TB of traffic a month are actually in front of their PCs actively consuming this content.

Also you have to look at the other end of the spectrum. My parents-in-law for example have two laptops at home, Google Apps Premiere accounts (so their Outlook is permanently connected to their Gmail accounts), two VoIP lines, and they are using a 5GB account - and don't go over it...

kobiak

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#387630 4-Oct-2010 12:28

boby55: You have got to be kidding me? Even with a S**T load of Legal Content, (Open Source Torrents, Tv On Demand, Youtube), No way can that amount to 1TB of usage, The only logical way for a home user to use that much would be indeed pirating content.

bloody easy. 10 dumps of blueray movies :D

It's ideal to have 80-100Gb for $50 at 2-4mbps like in europe/asia/states.

In fact, I'm paying more than I did 4 years ago for less. sure my speeds are faster but for what? emailling? reading news? as my cap could run out withing a week after everything else.

helping others at evgenyk.nz

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