Why are NZ Telcos so stingy with mobile data allowances?

Forums › New Zealand Mobile and Wireless › Why are NZ Telcos so stingy with mobile data allowances?

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#2690851 11-Apr-2021 13:25

That’s their party pay package which is a leader, follower type plan. For a solo device, it’s $40usd per month.

In NZ, a fully loaded leader-follower plan would be very similar in price (although on endless data).

They also throttle wifi tethering and limit tethering to one device. With the exception of Spark, all other carriers do not limit their wifi tethering.

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ajw

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#2690852 11-Apr-2021 13:29

cokemaster: That’s their party pay package which is a leader, follower type plan. For a solo device, it’s $40usd per month.

In NZ, a fully loaded leader-follower plan would be very similar in price (although on endless data).

They also throttle wifi tethering and limit tethering to one device. With the exception of Spark, all other carriers do not limit their wifi tethering.

Have a read again of the visible wireless website permanent $US 25 per month for one connection.

No Commitment

As low as

$25

/mo

when you take advantage of Party Pay

One line of service

Unlimited minutes and texts

Unlimited data

5 Mbps wifi hotspot

Wifi calling on compatible devices

Calling & texting to Canada & Mexico

Dochart

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#2690854 11-Apr-2021 13:34

ajw:
cokemaster: That’s their party pay package which is a leader, follower type plan. For a solo device, it’s $40usd per month.

In NZ, a fully loaded leader-follower plan would be very similar in price (although on endless data).

They also throttle wifi tethering and limit tethering to one device. With the exception of Spark, all other carriers do not limit their wifi tethering.

Have a read again of the visible wireless website permanent $US 25 per month for one connection.

I don’t think that’s right it’s $40 USD by itself and if you add 3 extra people the price will be $25 USD per month.

They did not word it properly. “As low as $25 when you take advantage of party pay”. With party pay you need at least 1 other person. 2 people is $35, 3 people is $30 and 4+ people is $25.

ajw

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#2690857 11-Apr-2021 13:40

@Dochart

Thats correct but they are all individual connections.

https://www.visible.com/plan/party-pay

Dochart

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#2690858 11-Apr-2021 13:42

ajw:
@Dochart

Thats correct but they are all individual connections.

https://www.visible.com/plan/party-pay

Yes which is a good thing. No need to worry about who pays the bill. I wish NZ Telcos did something like this so you wouldn’t have to force that one person in the group to pay the bill.

MaxineN

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#2690859 11-Apr-2021 13:43

ajw:

Have a read again of the visible wireless website permanent $US 25 per month for one connection.

No Commitment

As low as

$25

/mo

when you take advantage of Party Pay

One line of service

Powered by Verizon, now with 5G

Unlimited minutes and texts

Unlimited data

5 Mbps wifi hotspot

Wifi calling on compatible devices

Calling & texting to Canada & Mexico

You read right into the marketing. It is legitimately $40 USD a month. https://www.visible.com/plan/ CTRL+F $40 and you'll see that the more you get people to join on party pay the less you pay, and it works exactly like 2d and voda's offer.

They also might have some serious shaping going on. https://www.visible.com/help/data-speeds

I don't think visible is the best of examples.

Try looking into phone plans for Japan, most of them do 0 cost for sitting under 1-3GB of data which is absolutely insane value and for getting 20GB of data it's less than $45 NZD when you do the conversion but they've put a lot into their LTE network and they've shutdown most of the 3G space, we still have ours running and even vodafone keeps their 2G network going. That's a lot of cost.

Personally I wouldn't touch unlimited plans at different speeds unless it was at a damn good price. I would however opt for 24 hour bursts of unlimited data like Spark and 2Degrees do.

Ramblings from a mysterious lady who's into tech. Warning I may often create zingers.

MaxineN

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#2690860 11-Apr-2021 13:44

Dochart:

Yes which is a good thing. No need to worry about who pays the bill. I wish NZ Telcos did something like this so you wouldn’t have to force that one person in the group to pay the bill.

Be a welcomed quality of life change and so would being able to up front pay for a whole year(telcos please I'd love this).

Ramblings from a mysterious lady who's into tech. Warning I may often create zingers.

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ajw

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#2690861 11-Apr-2021 13:46

@MaxineN

Yes like Kogan mobile and it's the cheapest deal in NZ.

jjnz1

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#2690862 11-Apr-2021 13:48

So just to gauge the market here..

Do we think the uptake would be a huge for:

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yitz

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#2690866 11-Apr-2021 14:04

How about high data caps but only to be used in specified home coverage areas like the old 2d on-net/off-net roaming.

antonknee

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#2690872 11-Apr-2021 14:17

cokemaster: It’s hard to guarantee minimum speed based services over mobile networks as you’ve got to contend with:
* your normal Internet performance issues that impacted fixed services.
* handset capability - eg. Level of CA support, bands etc.
* signal quality - if you are in a low signal area, you may very well be unable to get your 20mbps.
* cell site capacity - some cell sites get incredibly ‘hot’, with fixed wireless you do have some control over what site or sector and how much load you are prepared to tolerate. With mobile, you have none of those controls as folks are free to roam or travel in packs.

All of these make it a potential minefield for delivering x mbps (depending on how hard the likes of the comm comm decide to enforce it vs. it being best efforts).

As for no cap plans, as an operator you’d want to avoid is a handful of customers absolutely torching your 3G bandwidth from filming 24/7 livestreams... as that type of activity is better suited to a fixed network arrangement.

Fair point - although I’ve personally never seen full speed mobile data below around 10mbps. In any case you would make this “up to x mbps” - ie your cheaper plan will never go above (say) 2mbps (or whatever). You would need to make your higher end plan a fairly low speed which you could realistically achieve consistently I guess.

KiwiSurfer

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#2690878 11-Apr-2021 14:26

antonknee: I strongly feel the Chorus model would have worked incredibly well to reduce triplicate investment from our MNOs which would have enabled cheaper pricing/more generous allowances.

Devil's advocate: The UFB model (which is what I assume you mean as Chorus is only one of several LFCs operating more or less the same model) only managed to get fibre to some ~80% of the population. Would that be satisfactory given the current model provides mobile coverage to >98% of the population. My guess is that government support was only really needed for the last percentage or two as we had coverage to >97% of the population prior to the government starting to invest large-scale in improving mobile coverage through RBI and other schemes. End devil's advocate.

I think the current model we have here seemed to have worked well. In recent years I've seem more and more examples of Spark, 2degrees and Vodafone co-locating with each other in urban areas where it makes sense for them to share passive physical infrastructure (sites, poles, etc) but keep their active infrastructure (antennas, BTS, etc) separate. As has already been pointed out we have RCG which is IMHO world-leading in that not one, not two, but three carriers are collaborating on improving rural coverage through sharing passive/active infrastructure. We also have the 2degrees/Vodafone MoRAN deal which means we now have hundreds of sites around the county which have active infrastructure sharing across at least two carriers.

The other thing to think about is that the underlying technologies (e.g. LTE) isn't optimally designed for 3 national carriers to share large amounts of spectrum. If we adopted the Chorus model and gave them all the LTE spectrum for them to operate services directly to end-users (as currently happens with UFB) they would have to operate a very complex network in order to make use of all the spectrum they have and also trunk it all back across to the RSPs. Not impossible (as lessons can be transferred over from the UFB network) but probably not the best way to do it at least with LTE/UMTS/GSM.

I am also aware of cases overseas where active sharing is being rolled back to separate arrangements. E.g. Vodafone and O2 in the UK for some years split half the UK into an O2 operated area and the other half Vodafone operated. I'm hearing that Vodafone is slowly withdrawing from that arrangement. Not sure of the reasons but I assume O2 and Vodafone had different ideas on how to deploy 5G and couldn't come to an agreement so it made more sense to split up and go their own ways? My take away is that sharing can bring savings but it can also limit opportunities in the future.

I think a better model perhaps would have to be some sort of independent entity that focused on just owning the land and physical assets (such as towers, poles, etc) with carriers leasing the land and/or space on poles/towers/etc. This would have the benefit that carriers (not just mobile but all other radio/TV/comms stuff too) can operate their own gear while taking advantage of sharing the cost of land/assets with others. Chorus could be a good entity to take on this role, focusing on just being a landlord while carriers focus on the electronics. This doesn't rule out the possibility of active infrastructure sharing either--e.g. land-owner entity land with RCG (or e.g. Vodafone+2degrees MoRAN) owned infrastructure.

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#2690880 11-Apr-2021 14:27

Dochart:

It’s been at 1.25gb for the $19 plan for a few years now and then you look at Australia and the equivalent to the $19 plan they can get 8-12gb of mobile data. Yes, Australia has over 25 million people so thats probably why they can offer more data for a cheaper price but they have more land compared to New Zealand so they would need to pay more for extending their coverage throughout Australia.

I doubt that per-capita coverage is more expensive in Australia even NZ even with their vast land area.

Australia and NZ have very different physical geographies which makes it meaningless to directly compare our mobile network coverage and investment levels. "Australia is a relatively low-lying island with low relief. It is the flattest of all the continents. The various highland ranges are pronounced, but are not high in elevation"* We have ~120 NZ peaks that are higher than Australia's tallest peak of 2,228m.

This is particularly true for 2G and 3G networks where signals can travel 30-80km so favouring flat landscapes over hilly landscapes. Halving the range due to obstruction by hills means that at least 4X the number of towers are needed to cover the same area. That's why land area is not a relevant metric. That's also why you can easily find the Australian stats but not the equivalent NZ stats - land area is meaningless in a hilly country.

Australia does have much more land, 7.692M km2, and mobile coverage is reported to be at least 31% of that area. In comparison, NZ is 1/28th of the land area at 0.268M km2. So Australian coverage is already 2,385M km2 or 9 times our total area. But consider that a tower with 20km of range can cover 100 times the area of a tower with its range limited by hills to 2km.

AFAIK, 4G and 5G networks have a much lower range with 5G less than 1km. This would reduce the flat-land advantage that Australia currently has. Then we might eventually have cost parity or even a cost advantage to extend the network to the vast majority of our population. But I suspect we will still have higher costs to establish and service mobile towers in a more challenging topography.

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#2690881 11-Apr-2021 14:42

4G/5G can have coverage comparable (if not better) to 2G/3G when you compare services within the same frequency band. Currently 4G coverage is (on purpose) slightly less than 3G due to carriers not wanting pockets of coverage that are 4G only due to some phones not supporting VoLTE. Also previously a lot of 4G deployment were in higher bands (e.g. 1800 MHz) which may have given the incorrect impression 4G can't provide the same level of coverage as 3G/2G. There is no reason 4G it can't be tuned to be better than 3G. A lot of the hype around 5G deployment overseas is with very high frequency bands (mmwave) but there is no reason why it can't be deployed in lower bands such as those used by current 2G/3G/4G services. Currently deployment in NZ is in 3.5 GHz bands which is the reason for the limited coverage, not the NR (5G) technology itself. I am aware of overseas deployment in sub-GHz bands with coverage I assume comparable to current technologies.

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#2690882 11-Apr-2021 14:47

ajw:
@MaxineN

Yes like Kogan mobile and it's the cheapest deal in NZ.

Is kogan on 2d, VF or Spark?

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