Orcons new broadband plans

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tonyhughes

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#49766 26-Oct-2006 12:06

freitasm: If your use of the Internet is for downloading copyrighted material, then your needs have a different level. For example, why should a provider arrange for content downloading to be fast, leaving other legal uses suffering because of the high bandwidth used by those illegal downloads?

Your entire post contained all fair points, but certainly I would rather my provider offered me a fixed offer of service, leaving it up to me to decide what I want to do with it.

Just because I have gigs of torrents coming down, doesnt mean its pr0n or copyrighted movies etc.

I think a better move would be to throttle *customers* that suck lots of bandwidth, at peak times only (i.e. you could have say an hour of full rate downloads at peak times before you were throttled to say, 512kbps. This would give everyone the opportunity to get on with what they want to do, and still leave a usable service for those with high needs.

Once the ISPs start saying "we are curbing illegal traffic with these restrictions", then they might become liable to *prevent* the illegal traffic to start with.

Yes, illegal traffic is the root cause (in my opinion) of the problems we will experience here, but is the ISP level the right level at which to solve that particular problem? I think not.

ictgeeknz

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#49788 26-Oct-2006 12:53

The Orcon page has been updated with a better form layout and graphics, and states that the ZeroShock plan is subject to traffic management.

Initial analysis suggests that Slingshot has more bread for your buck?

scracha

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#49814 26-Oct-2006 13:27

centaurianz: The Orcon page has been updated with a better form layout and graphics, and states that the ZeroShock plan is subject to traffic management.

Initial analysis suggests that Slingshot has more bread for your buck?

You've also got to factor in how reliable you want your service to be and how good you want your technical support to be. In this area, many of my customers find Slingshot lacking. If email and/or Internet access is essential to your business, then you don't save "bread" when your Internet connection keeps doing down.

Nobody [*1] seems to mention the "tolls" element either. I had to do a LOT of hunting to find and ISP offering the best call rates as well as factoring in ADSL useage. In the end I chose Orcon for a combination of the above factors.

[1] None of the PC magazines nor the online calculators seem to factor this in.

ictgeeknz

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#49828 26-Oct-2006 13:38

Oh, I agree! Being an Orcon customer myself (for over 3 years) the service has been very reliable. The customer support has always been A+ on the very limited number of occasions where I've had to phone them.

For those folks (residential) shopping around for large data caps at the moment, Slingshot appears to have the best value-for-money in that department at least.

Oh and, how many other ISPs do you see posting news about their own network upgrades? Orcon does.

maelgwyn

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#50760 2-Nov-2006 10:30

I've been with Orcon for about a year now and just upgraded to their max/max Zero-Shock plan, so I'll see what happens at the end of the month! But so far, I'm now on 5370Mbps/91kbps (not sure why the upload is SO slow - my router says that I can reach 736Kbps :S)...

Cost isn't such a huge issue here, as I've got 4 flatmates as well, so the price divided amongst us all works out pretty good!

dzn

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#51366 6-Nov-2006 22:17

freitasm: All those TV shows are available on DVD. Just import them. Sooner or later they are also here in New Zealand. I pay more for my 10Mbps connection with large cap because I use it for business and my day to day Internet needs.

If your use of the Internet is for downloading copyrighted material, then your needs have a different level. For example, why should a provider arrange for content downloading to be fast, leaving other legal uses suffering because of the high bandwidth used by those illegal downloads?

The value of something is directly proportional to your needs, to the availability and the demand. If you want a high speed service, bear in mind that traffic from and to New Zealand costs more than traffic within continental U.S. Also the number of people in the U.S. using these services is much higher than New Zealand.

Therefore it will be cheaper and even possible to have unlimited broadband in the U.S and not have the same offering here.

As sbiddle says, a lot of people want all the speed, no limits and for $29.95 a month. This is simply not possible.

Ok, I dont normally post on forums but this whole debate caught my attention.
A few things really,
1) this has nothing to do with illegal downloads, it is about paying for a service and getting a service what everyone is complaining about is the lack of sufficiant service provided by our telco.
2) all of this is to do with money, its simple business
3) yeah go the people that dont want to spend what little money they may have because they are smart enough to figure out how to download a movie or a tv show, or try their games or whatever

anyway, Id been overseas for almost a year so when i got back and just got on this unleashed broadband plan from xtra I expected a lot more than what I got....

and you might want to rephrase this :

freitasm: "The value of something is directly proportional to your needs"

ictgeeknz

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#51672 8-Nov-2006 21:12

For a brief period a couple of months back, I changed to a 3.5MB plan and the average download speed was roughly 2MB/s, I was unsatisfied at the time and went back to 256kbps.

This week I decided to upgrade to a MAX/128 option (not ZeroShock) which was actioned in like 24hrs. I was pleasantly surprised to see my average d/load speed at 4MB/s!!!

NICE!

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DonGould

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#51814 10-Nov-2006 02:53

I agree. The new offerings from Orcon are [expletive removed].

I'm going to wait for the current problems in the network to calm down and then probablly look at flicking back to Xtra.

I figure if I send the message that they're not good enough, by going to Xtra, that will give them more ammo to say they're loosing customers because they're not getting a good enough wholesale deal.

Cheers Don

[Moderator edit (MF): replaced expletive]

Promote New Zealand - Get yourself a .kiwi.nz domain name!!!

Check out mine - i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz - don@i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz

ictgeeknz

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#52030 12-Nov-2006 07:05

DonGould:

I'm going to wait for the current problems in the network to calm down and then probablly [sic] look at flicking back to Xtra.

Uh... what network problems?

DonGould

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#52066 12-Nov-2006 11:22

centaurianz:
DonGould:

I'm going to wait for the current problems in the network to calm down and then probablly [sic] look at flicking back to Xtra.

Uh... what network problems?

You didn't notice the people complaining about the impact of 'go large' on the entire network?

Promote New Zealand - Get yourself a .kiwi.nz domain name!!!

Check out mine - i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz - don@i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz

tonyhughes

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#52067 12-Nov-2006 11:35

DonGould: I agree. The new offerings from Orcon are [expletive removed].

I'm going to wait for the current problems in the network to calm down and then probablly look at flicking back to Xtra.

I figure if I send the message that they're not good enough, by going to Xtra, that will give them more ammo to say they're loosing customers because they're not getting a good enough wholesale deal.

Cheers Don

[Moderator edit (MF): replaced expletive]

Wow thats the most misguided thing i have seen posted here in a long time.

I understand what you are trying to achieve, but I seriously hope for Orcons sake you are kidding...

Perhaps Seeby might come on here and tell all his customers to leave and go to Xtra, so that Orcon might be in a better position down the track.

Again, wow.

ictgeeknz

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#52068 12-Nov-2006 11:39

Sorry, I misread what you were trying to say. I thought you were implying that Orcon had network problems.

willnz

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#52071 12-Nov-2006 12:03

DonGould: I agree. The new offerings from Orcon are [expletive removed].

I'm going to wait for the current problems in the network to calm down and then probablly look at flicking back to Xtra.

I figure if I send the message that they're not good enough, by going to Xtra, that will give them more ammo to say they're loosing customers because they're not getting a good enough wholesale deal.

Cheers Don

[Moderator edit (MF): replaced expletive]

Personally (my views are entirely my own and may or may not reflect those of my employer), I can't see any reason why they're not getting a good wholesale deal. Low usage/Low speed plans are always going to be the least profitable - and maybe even sold at a loss. This is the nature of business.

Back in July, the wholesale price for 3.5/512 was $53.67. Now, Orcon and the other ISP's are paying $38 for up to 7.6/768. That's over double the speed, for 70% of the price.

I've never been a fan of Telecom and it's wholesale regime. However, even I now fully believe that they've got sick of being the bad guy and just want to get on with making life somewhat easier for all parties.

</brainwashedtelecomrant>

Fraktul

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#52224 13-Nov-2006 21:21

willnz:
DonGould: I agree. The new offerings from Orcon are [expletive removed].

I'm going to wait for the current problems in the network to calm down and then probablly look at flicking back to Xtra.

I figure if I send the message that they're not good enough, by going to Xtra, that will give them more ammo to say they're loosing customers because they're not getting a good enough wholesale deal.

Cheers Don

[Moderator edit (MF): replaced expletive]

Personally (my views are entirely my own and may or may not reflect those of my employer), I can't see any reason why they're not getting a good wholesale deal. Low usage/Low speed plans are always going to be the least profitable - and maybe even sold at a loss. This is the nature of business.

Back in July, the wholesale price for 3.5/512 was $53.67. Now, Orcon and the other ISP's are paying $38 for up to 7.6/768. That's over double the speed, for 70% of the price.

I've never been a fan of Telecom and it's wholesale regime. However, even I now fully believe that they've got sick of being the bad guy and just want to get on with making life somewhat easier for all parties.

$38 for Zone 2 yes, not everyone lives in Zone 2 however. As such the pricing needs to be a trade off in the average cost or proportionate cost based on number of potential customers in each zone vs complicated pricing. Also people with faster plans can potentially download more. Based on a sliding window average for 2 months of an ISPs UBS throughput and the number UBS customers excess usage is charged at $2.85/GB by TCNZ.

Until ISPs can look at usage trends with new plans and other statistical modeling you will see pricing which is a tad on the conservative side. Telecoms Wholesale UBS/WBS pricing model is not 'making life somewhat easier for all parties', it is a pain in the proverbial.

Drac

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#52646 16-Nov-2006 13:55

Due to my new address I was looking at the “unlimited” plans being offered but I think I’ll stick with a capped plan as I’m currently involved in beta testing 2 MMO’s and I regularly blow those daily limits, but still struggle to hit 20Gb per month. Reason for post - just pointing out that you don’t have to be doing anything illegal to have issues with the “unlimited” daily limits.

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