I think most of us regard these new plans rather cynicially given Telecom's complete failure to reach their original target of 83,333 wholesale customers (which they then failed to change into a 1/3 new connections target). Given the noise coming out of the CC and the government, Telecom must be rather jittery. However while pricing for UBS etc hasn't yet leaked out, it appears Telecom hasn't yet decided to play nice. It's bad enough that ISP who don't accept the offer might be left out in the cold for a year or two while the CC reaches a decision as happened previously but it's gotten worse. According to Computerworld they appear to be blackmailing ISPs into accepting their offer (whatever the offer is) since if even one rejects, they'll reassess the situation.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/0A43C597ACCCD7B6CC25711000701FA4
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/28363DAAB75B1F61CC2571140028E35A

This appears to be rather a bad move on their part IMHO but I guess they decided if they're going to go down, they might as well go down guns blazing. We can only hope the government, CC and ISPs stay equally as strong...

At 06:53 p.m. 13/02/2006, you wrote:
>http://www.telecom.co.nz/chm/0,5123,205112-203090,00.html
>
>In a nutshell, they've come up with 7 emotively named plans (basic, go, explorer, adventure, pro, pro advanced, and pro ultra) that still charge like a wounded bull. I've haven't seen any of the other ISPs come out with UBS plan information yet, but I expect they'll all be rather similar.
>
>The Basic plan is 256/128 for $29.95 with a rather embaressing 200mb data cap (come on.. even windows update, virus updates, etc will chew through that pretty quickly)
>
>Go (2048/128) is the only plan that stays at 2mbps, and has a 1GB cap ($39.95)
>
>Explorer ($49.95) and Adventure ($59.95) are 3500/128, with absolutely pathetic 5gb and 10gb caps respectively, and unless you want to pay $79.95 per month or more to go to Pro and beyond, you're still stuck on 128kbps upstream. Many would argue that even at 2048/128, the upstream rate already impacts, or even limits the download speed (more so if you have more than one user on your home network), so I wonder what the hell the think people are going to do with their 3.5mbps download speed if they can't send ACKs fast enough to get that speed anyway.
>
>Remember, Telecom counts traffic in BOTH directions, so the more they increase the speed, the more easily they allow people to hit their cap, which in turn forces their customers to upgrade to a plan they didn't really want just so they can still use the internet for the last 2-3 weeks of their billing cycle.
>
>Oh, and the usual "if you don't have your tolls with us, you can add $10 to all those plans" restriction applies.
>
>You have to admire telecom for their marketing strategy here - the people that have been complaining about their upstream rate and change to the 512kbps plans will be paying more than they did before, which means more profit for telecom. The people who currently have dialup and never use the internet will be sucked in to the go plan so that they can run google earth and see all those things their grandchildren have told them about, and once they do they'll exceed their 200MB cap and have to "upgrade" to the $39.95 go plan, which again means more profit for Telecom.
>
>And finally, my physical connect rate here is is only 2560kbps (admittedly, with g.lite) - so even if I went to a 3.5mbs plan, the crappy copper I have to my socket would be the limiting factor for me. I remember that telecom used to say that they wouldn't enable ADSL for anyone that couldn't connect to the exchange at at least 2mbps - I wonder if they'll up that figure, or if they'll start re-laying copper in those locations where people have asked for 3.5mbps and can't get it due to the quality of the wires.

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