I moved into an apartment in October 2012 on Newton Road, Auckland.

For years prior I had been on the wholesale network with Vodafone (Naked DSL) at various houses in the 'burbs and most of the time my modem connected at around 12-16mbps.

A bonus of moving to this new place is that my address was in the Red Network area which will save me money and hopefully result in a faster connection speed. 

After a few hiccups getting my broadband service activated I was finally able to connect. The ongoing problem is that my connection speed is only around 3-4mbps.

Over the first six weeks of moving in, I had discussions with various (mostly helpful) people from Vodafone and even a Chorus tech call out to check my line in order to determine the issue. Along the way I was told that changing from Red to Wholesale wouldn't fix my issue.

The last contact from Vodafone back in November was a voice mail stating the following:
My name is [...] I'm calling from VF Faults, I just want to follow up on the problems you've been having with slow speeds.

We were able to have a look into the matter and have also worked with Chorus to clarify exactly what is happening.

Apparently the cable that is [feeding?] the cabinet which you are connecting to is in desperate need of an upgrade and that's what's causing, in essence, the sync rates you are getting now so the speeds you are getting now.

Now until this is upgraded, it will not improve so there is really nothing the technicians can do about it, that cable will need to be upgraded for the speeds to get any better.

Now the problem is since this is an infrastructure change, in essence it will require quite a bit of money to put it through. So in essence it's up to Chorus to decide where to invest the money to upgrade and so forth.

We've tried to get some answers, at the moment the advice is they don't actually have an ETR for this [stupid?] thing to be upgraded so unfortunately I couldn't tell you specifically when that will happen I'm told it will take quite a bit of money and time to do so at the moment it's not in the works.

So I know it's really not the best of outcomes, at least we know exactly what we're looking at [usual call ending].


I've been persevering with the slow speeds in the knowledge there is nothing that can be done to fix this, although it's really driving me nuts - hence this post. I'm not due for a fibre upgrade for at least another 18 months.

Is there anything at all I can do to get Chorus to fork out some money and upgrade this cable? 
Surely speeds of <4mbps in Auckland CBD fringe cannot be acceptable?

I would appreciate any input.