Telecom slashes price of broadband by up to 83pc

Telecom's broadband ad.

Telecom is slashing the price of its business broadband offerings by as much as 83 per cent in a bid to attract more customers.

"We're trying to encourage broadband uptake, and we're not wanting to focus on our consumer market, we're wanting to focus on our business market as well," said Nick Brown, spokesman for Xtra. "We're confident this will really drive broadband in the business market."

The company is introducing three new business plans on July 8 that offer download speeds up to 24 to 50 times faster than dial-up, with monthly allowances of three, 10 and 15 gigabytes respectively.

Monthly charges are heavily reduced from existing offerings. The three-gigabyte plan, at 24 times the speed of dial-up - or roughly one megabyte a second - is now $119.95 compared with $309.78 previously.

The 10-gigabyte plan, also at 24 times faster, is $149.95, compared with $905.78.

The top-level, 15-gigabyte plan, at 50 times faster, is $299.95, which is comparable with the old 20-gigabyte plan at $1617.

Two of the three plans offer slightly slower download speeds than the old offerings. All three of the old plans had download speeds of 50 times faster than dial-up, or what Telecom calls "full-speed."

Under the new plans, customers pay 4.44 cents per megabyte over the monthly data allowance. Alternatively, customers can choose a flat rate where there are no excess charges, but the connection is reduced to dial-up speed once the limit is surpassed.

Brown said existing "full-speed" plans would still be offered, but Telecom's emphasis would be in signing up customers to the new plans.