I'm often in the position of advising friends and family members on which ISP/etc to use.  At the moment a lot of friends/etc who ask are on low incomes.

Usually I just say "Flip" but have recently run into someone who probably has dodgy phone cabling; after switching from POTS with Spark to POTS+DSL with Flip, their phone has become unreliable (incoming/outgoing calls often fail) and fixing this would involve a Chorus callout which at $120 is out of my friend's budget.

They have UFB available.  Currently the only cheap (<$70/mo) UFB option available here in Whanganui is Compass.  I last used them on dialup, so have no idea what they're like.  It sounds like Slingshot will launch in UFF areas soon too.

The main centres (and Hamilton) seem to have many more options, but again the question is, are the cheap ones any good?

By "good" I mean: the internet and voice services are reliable, and when things go wrong, the callcentre is helpful and problems are resolved quickly and without additional costs involved.  Cheap tolls preferred, internet speed merely needs to be adequate.