Base Fibre plans get Faster

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eXDee

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#123192 27-Jun-2013 19:56

http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/three-ufb-wholesalers-offer-faster-fibre-plans-citing-growth-broadband-tv-ck-142149

The good news: three wholesale UFB providers are going to offer faster fibre plans for $39.95 from August 31.The so-so news: you'll have to pay $2.34 more than their current base plans.

The bad: the three wholesalers: Enable (Christchurch), Ultrafast Fibre (Hamilton, Tauranga, Whanganui) and Northpower Fibre (Whangarei) cover only around 20% of the UFB rollout.

The balance is held by Chorus, which had no immediate comment.

The new plans have 50Mbps download and 20Mbps upload speeds (the previous base level was 30Mbit/s down - roughly three times the speed of most copper broadband or ADSL connections - and 10Mbit/s up).

Good to hear! Will be interesting to see if chorus follows.

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#846778 28-Jun-2013 15:10

Chorus offers a 50/10 service but I don't think that any ISPs have picked it up yet.

TwoSeven

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#846805 28-Jun-2013 15:52

I wish they wouldn't relate the slower speed packages as UFB. My original perception was that UFB was to be fast and inexpensive (minimum 100 down/50 up) and less than what we pay now for the same thing. However, it seems that the old strategy of dropping the price by offering less is still around.

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surfisup1000

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#846809 28-Jun-2013 15:57

While extra options are appreciated I would first like an ISP so I can get UFB in the first place.

Orcon is the only national ISP offering broadband in Tauranga and they have significant back-haul bandwidth limitations so there is no point connecting to their UFB service anyway.

Telecom/Vodafone/Snap all have 'plans' to offer service but it has been close to a year since my property was UFB enabled now.

Still waiting Snap...I was hoping we'd have heard something by now. Mind you, Snaps 70/10 VDSL service is pretty good although a bit more expensive than UFB.

sbiddle

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#846815 28-Jun-2013 16:38

I find it funny that this has suddenly made the news when Chorus announced their 50/10 plan a few months ago.

The reality is upstream of more than 10 isn't a great deal of use to most people, but a 50Mbps service for not much more than 30 is an appealing entry level product.

CYaBro

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#846828 28-Jun-2013 17:05

Check out the speedtest to Sydney in my sig. :)

But then Uber have had faster speeds than everyone else (in Whangarei) on fibre.

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

linw

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#847034 29-Jun-2013 09:17

Orcon 30/10 Sydney, Telstra.

freitasm

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#847038 29-Jun-2013 09:26

sbiddle: I find it funny that this has suddenly made the news when Chorus announced their 50/10 plan a few months ago.

And that's why I didn't post the press release when received. As in "is this really news?" "how will this affect consumer prices?" "when will this affect consumer prices?"

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maverick

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#847042 29-Jun-2013 09:31

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sbiddle

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#847046 29-Jun-2013 09:47

maverick:

Didn't the boss let you have a 100Mbps P2P symmetrical connection?

maverick

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#847047 29-Jun-2013 09:48

don't be a hater Steve

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TwoSeven

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#847169 29-Jun-2013 16:28

sbiddle: I find it funny that this has suddenly made the news when Chorus announced their 50/10 plan a few months ago.

The reality is upstream of more than 10 isn't a great deal of use to most people, but a 50Mbps service for not much more than 30 is an appealing entry level product.

What research did you do to confirm that an upstream better than 10 isn't any use to 'most' people?

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ashnizzle

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#847174 29-Jun-2013 16:39

thats really good to hear. lets hope telecom increases their base plans from 30/10 to 50/10

other than that im pretty happy with my base speed plan. not having any issues with streaming content now infact streaming for me as increased a whole lot now as suppose to downloading

kiwirock

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#847189 29-Jun-2013 17:20

TwoSeven:
sbiddle: I find it funny that this has suddenly made the news when Chorus announced their 50/10 plan a few months ago.

The reality is upstream of more than 10 isn't a great deal of use to most people, but a 50Mbps service for not much more than 30 is an appealing entry level product.

What research did you do to confirm that an upstream better than 10 isn't any use to 'most' people?

Until one teenager is maxing out the upstream to upload a Youtube clip, then the downstream reduces too about as terrible as the congested upstream path.

Yes Yes I know, most people use the downstream path more, but asymmetric is a pet hate of mine when the above happens.

I thought the purpose of UFB was to boost economic possibility? Upstream should be more important than 10Mbps in that in that case if we're to use it for digital economic growth. Still, 10Mbps I can't complain, beats 1Mbps ADSL2+.

hamish225

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#847190 29-Jun-2013 17:22

kiwirock:
TwoSeven:
sbiddle: I find it funny that this has suddenly made the news when Chorus announced their 50/10 plan a few months ago.

The reality is upstream of more than 10 isn't a great deal of use to most people, but a 50Mbps service for not much more than 30 is an appealing entry level product.

What research did you do to confirm that an upstream better than 10 isn't any use to 'most' people?

Until one teenager is maxing out the upstream to upload a Youtube clip, then the downstream reduces too about as terrible as the congested upstream path.

Yes Yes I know, most people use the downstream path more, but asymmetric is a pet hate of mine when the above happens.

I thought the purpose of UFB was to boost economic possibility? Upstream should be more important than 10Mbps in that in that case if we're to use it for digital economic growth. Still, 10Mbps I can't complain, beats 1Mbps ADSL2+.

the upstream being fully utilised shouldn't affect downstream speeds? or am i wrong?

*Insert big spe*dtest result here*

kiwirock

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#847194 29-Jun-2013 17:36

the upstream being fully utilised shouldn't affect downstream speeds? or am i wrong?

Yep it does. TCP acknowledgement frames are required to be sent before the next piece of say a download, is sent to you. Unless you employ your own bandwidth shapping/traffic management system to make sure TCP ACK frames are not queued by your routers, if your upstream path is maxed out and ACK frames are queued, then the next piece of downstream data relating to it is held up until the acknowledgement is sent. This is how TCP works to prevent bombing a connection that's already congested.

Unfortunately, asymmetric links do this by their nature. Most of the time, Joe Bloggs shouldn't be maxing his upstream path, since he uses more on the downstream side. But when he does, the downstream side starts to perform as good as the congested upstream path. Managing TCP ACK frames is a quick way to prevent poor download performance when doing some heavy uploading.

I think it's personally quite a dirty side effect, so the more a client uploads the worse their downstream experience can be. I've seen some complain of poor ADSL performance, to find their kids had a bittorrent app running and uploading galore causing the congestion on their downloads. Not that often, but it does happen.

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