Telecom Keeps On Trying To Fool Us
Yet another blatant move to pre-empt and undermine the government's impending regulatory action: Telecom has announced what appears on the surface to be an exciting change to broadband in New Zealand, but is actually just a tasty piece of bait filled with all the tricks Telecom are all too good at pulling.
The telco recently announced these new broadband plans that will start October 26th, with all plans capable of "max" download speed (expected to be up to 7.6mbps). At first the plans look pretty good, and a far cry from what they currently have on offer. But if you look closer, they're a load of crap.
Now before I lose the interest of those of you who aren't so technically inclined and don't know your bits from your bytes, I just urge you not to believe Telecom when they ask you to join them in their 'xtraordinary new world'. Kinda like when your parents told you not to take lollies from strange men. Thanks.
Ok, so carrying on...
Firstly, Telecom have dropped any medium usage plan, forcing people onto the more expensive plans. So, you either pay $40 for a 1GB data allowance (which any semi-regular net user would chew through with the speed they're given), or you pay $50 for unlimited data. Where's the middle ground there?
Secondly, on the "Go Large" plan, they offer "Unlimited" data usage. Now, most people would say "f**k yeah!" to this news, but the definition of UNLIMITED is slightly, no, thoroughly bent if you read through Telecom's "fair use" policy. The policy states that if you go through more than 700MB of data within the 8 hour peak period (4pm-12am) you'll be told off and put in the "fair use pool" (that's actually what its called), where heavy users and file-sharers swim around in the same murky, slow-assed bandwidth.
This is farcical! How the hell can you call something unlimited, and then shove a whole lot of limits on it!? And 700MB?! If the speeds are up to 7.6mbps like they're promising, you could download 700MB in 15 minutes! And you've gotta restrict yourself to that much for 8 hours!!
What Telecom needs to do is stop screwing New Zealand around, and give us truly unlimited data, and full speed download AND upload.
As Public Enemy said: Don't believe the hype, yeeeeah boy.
The telco recently announced these new broadband plans that will start October 26th, with all plans capable of "max" download speed (expected to be up to 7.6mbps). At first the plans look pretty good, and a far cry from what they currently have on offer. But if you look closer, they're a load of crap.
Now before I lose the interest of those of you who aren't so technically inclined and don't know your bits from your bytes, I just urge you not to believe Telecom when they ask you to join them in their 'xtraordinary new world'. Kinda like when your parents told you not to take lollies from strange men. Thanks.
Ok, so carrying on...
Firstly, Telecom have dropped any medium usage plan, forcing people onto the more expensive plans. So, you either pay $40 for a 1GB data allowance (which any semi-regular net user would chew through with the speed they're given), or you pay $50 for unlimited data. Where's the middle ground there?
Secondly, on the "Go Large" plan, they offer "Unlimited" data usage. Now, most people would say "f**k yeah!" to this news, but the definition of UNLIMITED is slightly, no, thoroughly bent if you read through Telecom's "fair use" policy. The policy states that if you go through more than 700MB of data within the 8 hour peak period (4pm-12am) you'll be told off and put in the "fair use pool" (that's actually what its called), where heavy users and file-sharers swim around in the same murky, slow-assed bandwidth.
This is farcical! How the hell can you call something unlimited, and then shove a whole lot of limits on it!? And 700MB?! If the speeds are up to 7.6mbps like they're promising, you could download 700MB in 15 minutes! And you've gotta restrict yourself to that much for 8 hours!!
What Telecom needs to do is stop screwing New Zealand around, and give us truly unlimited data, and full speed download AND upload.
As Public Enemy said: Don't believe the hype, yeeeeah boy.
posted by Hayden at 2:55 pm
3 Comments:
I had a job with Telecom once. My job was to ring up people on their cellphones and ask them if they knew how to use their phone. I quit after 40 minutes.
But when the training dude got us to ask questions about Telecom before we went to the phones, the big question was "Why is the Broadband here so crap?" So, he explained that we just don't have enough people in NZ to justify letting me download Sopranos Season 6 off BitTorrent in an hour flat. And while I like my ADSL fast, I must side with Telecom.
*Ducks*
Amen to that Hayden! And I think the BitTorrent thing is a red herring, in all honesty. But as I always say, a privatized monopoly such as Telecom is, cannot be reasonably expected to factor in public interest into their strategic thinking. The problem lies not within the "evil" of the corporation, much as we all like Theresa-bashing: by that definition, all profit-maximising corporations would be evil and those that don't seek to maximise profit perish. The problem lies with the political economy and the toothless regulation. We need regulation either to ensure decent competition or decent public investment to bring NZ into the 21st century. In some leading broadband countries, such as South Korea, they even manage to do both!
Well, the claim that there are not enough people in NZ to allow you to have fast broadband is just a load of crap. In Norway we're just as many people and our Internet-connection is superb. No downloadcaps, and you usually get the speed you pay for. (Which by the way is sooo much faster than here...)
I guess you could argue that Norway is quite a wealthy country and that's the reason why it's better.
But just to let you know, Telecom should come up with a better argument than that!
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