At 09:40 p.m. 22/10/2005, you wrote:
>I can't do that without incurring significant cost! (for a student with
>unstable income) One of the reasons I was so cagy about changing is
>because this flat was in flux. A week ago we got a date when people are
>moving out, and it is the end of next month. Which makes the options all
>the more untenable.

I'm a bit confused about what cost. To my best knowledge, you don't pay the churn fee (at least not directly) and there is no minimum period. Unless you're on a minimum period with Telecom who are going to try to force you to pay up (as others have reported) then I don't see what this mystical cost is.

Your situation is unfortunate. But Telecom and Orcon can't be blamed for inconvenience caused due to the fact your changing flat. Telecom perhaps can be blamed for making the decision to end JPP but that's all. If Orcon is force to pay a churn fee and only to lose you a month later that is unfortunate but really in this case it would seem best to just let them or follow my recommendation below.

Personally, I think you best option would have been to go back to dialup for few weeks while your changing flat. Annoying perhaps but do you really need broadband that seriously?

>No as already explained, none of them have been remotely tenable for
>various reasons, not least being that I end up with service disruptions,
>have to change over various services to live with a dynamic ip, get
>increased cost for decreased upstream speed(not that I have been getting
>the 64kbits I moved to this plan for in the first place for last few
>months as it turns out)
>
>> In my experience with UBS (which is admittedly minor, as I've only
>> bothered to churn one connection), it was more a fact of a few hours
>> downtime from the time my PPP session was dropped, to the time I
>> corrected my username to authenticate as a UBS user.
>>
>> This was with Orcon.
>>
>> It was, to my surprise, reasonably painless.
>I have been told that there is a backlog, 14 days does not guarantee the
>the churn will happen on time.

Are you sure you have to live with a dynamic IP. I know there has been a lot of discussion about this in the past. AFAIK, a number of ISPs offer static IPs with UBS but they discouraged (barred?) by Telecom from advertising this. I know those who signed up for UBS with Orcon in the early days (e.g. me) got them.

Also, if you are going to be moving flat in a month or whatever then you are going to be losing your 192k upstream in a month, so I really don't see what's the fuss considering you don't even have a 192k upstream!

There are many UBS options with many ISPs. AFAIK, most of them are cheaper then JPP or Xtra especially if you have tolls with said ISP. For example, you'll pay $70 to Xtra (if you have tolls with Telecom) for a 2mbit/128k 10gb connection with Telecom. You'll pay $49.95 for a 2mbit/128k 11gb UBS connection (although this is not a flatrate connection, you pay $10 for every 10gb or part thereof extra you use). If you don't have tolls with Orcon it'll be $10 extra so still cheaper. Similarly, $49.95 for a 2mbit/128k 10gb+10gb connection from Ihug (this is flat rate) although you'll pay more and have less data if you don't have tolls with Ihug. Ihug doesn't even count uploads to your data cap which must be good for you since I guess upload is a big part of your traffic. I'm sure other ISPs have similar plans, I'm only aware of these two as I use Orcon and am considering changing to Ihug due to their good 2mbit plans for 'heavy' users.

Also, as others have said, the service disruptions you speak about are for most users no where near the level which you seem to think they are. The only issue is that Telecom does not always appear to change over when they say they will (at least this happened with me). This does not mean you do not have service rather that you may not know when to change your authentication information. However this should not be that great a hassle. You can change authentication info when they say you should and if it does not work, go back to the old info and keep trying every day or some such. Alternatively, wait until your connection stops working then change authentication information (although I would not recommend this for various reasons). At most I expect you'll get an hour of downtime but I suspect probably a few minutes is more likely Obviously, this is not counting the time it takes you to change authentication info.

In your specific case, it's possible Telecom's failure to change over your connection on time might in fact result in your losing all service but if this happens, it's your fault. This will only occur because Telecom had ended your connection, as have you've been warned is going to happen and you did not take action soon enough.

>Given the ammount of hassles I have had (and given) I don't see why I
>need to get jiped more when there is a tenable solution... i.e extend
>the grace for a month.
>
>As I said as of this week, I have been told by telecom that this can
>happen. The last orcon staffer gave me the not so concrete asnwer of...
>"well if telecom have said they won't disconnect the port at the
>exchange on the 28th... then..."

As far as I can tell, Orcon's position here is simply if Telecom does what you say they promised to do, you will not have any problem. If they don't, please don't come moaning to us because it's not our fault, don't expect us to do anything about it. This is a reasonable position IMHO, especially considering the amount of moaning you appear to do (actually it's a reasonable position whatever you're like, Orcon can't be held at fault for Telecom not doing what they said they would)

>I spose all I want at the moment, is a little better reassurance i'm not
>going to get cut off next week. And for some closure on the upstream
>issue.

If Telecom has really promised to keep your connection active, I do hope you've got that in a written reply. If not, I hope you at least go the name of the person who promised you this and perhaps recorded the conversation. This way, you should at least get some sort of rebate for your inconvenience. In my experience Telecom appears to be good at offering rebates provided you can actually convince them that they have done something wrong (which is usually the tricky part)

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