KEY POINTS:
Broadband users on Telecom's Go Large service are in line to receive a refund of at least $130.
Telecom has announced today they are crediting customers of the service for monthly plan charges incurred since last December.
The problem relates to the management of traffic under the plan. Go Large allows customers to unlimited downloading and internet surfing but Telecom will reduce speeds when the network is busy.
What do you think?
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Here is an earlier selection of your views:
Jason
Lately Xtra broadband seems to have turned to custard. We have been on three different plans in the last month including Go-Large. They advertise that they are giving you full download and upload and then sometimes the internet is actually fast but then it will slow down to unbearable speeds....you might as well be on dial up sometimes. I know that my phone line can carry up to 2.8Mega bites per second and paying $80 a month that is what I believe I should be getting at a consistent rate, especially if they say they are providing maximum download speeds.
Graham
Just a note regarding Telecom not signing up new customers.They signed me up on Monday night just gone. I was not informed of changes to service conditions then or since.
Kerry
I have recently switched from Telecoms go large plan to a new isp, Ihug. My speed has increased tenfold.
Bede
Personally, I am looking forward to the Commerce Commission seeing Telecom in court for this blatant act of false advertising. Roll on competition in the market.
Al Bundy
We have ve been lied to for years by Telecom and ISPs, and should all be getting a refund, not just those who have been on this latest (and poor quality) service. ISPs have represented themselves as internet providers, while in reality they are little more than providers of Web (HTTP) and Email (SMTP/POP3). Any protocol that doesnt fit their view of how the internet should be used by everyone, is lumped in the same category as P2P applications, and often performs poorly as a result. An ISP should provide raw IP access only, not dictating to us how we use our connections. By all means, rate limit to ensure fair use by everyone, but rate limit based on the connection, and share what bandwidth is available fairly, rather than making arbitrary decisions on what people can and cannot do.
Kit
Several months ago Telecom gave me a $150 credit on my Xtra broadband account because, following a customer service call in which I expressed huge disaatisfaction with the service. The said that they had monitored my usage and in the words of the customer service rep It sucks. As the $150 would cover the difference in price for 15 months worth of unlimited downloads I asked about that. Better to stay put they said. If you move to Unlimited you qill be worse off for speed, and, if you didnt like it you would d not be allowed back on your old 5GB plan. Speed is marginally better (sometimes) but peak times it continues to be pathetic.
W Lennie
We signed up to Telecom broadband late last year, but prior to the great "unleashed" moment. From then on the download speeds have continued in a downward direction. Previously we were obtaining speeds of 2.8MB/sec which was quite good. For example, on YouTube one could download and watch a video clip in one hit. Today' speed is recorded at 0.496MB/sec and YouTube has become YouSnooze, the stop/download/start cycle is so frequent that it's not worth trying to watch anything. To add insult to injury, when I phoned Telecom to get help or information, their customer services rep told me that the slow speed was due to the Telecom-supplied ADSL inline filter being "crap" and that I should buy replacement ones at Dick Smith! Needless to say new filters have made no improvement and I am even more $$ out of pocket.
Phil Sinclair
Everything this Telecom mob do is so tinged with their lame attempts at spin it contains the aura of farce. This bit from the report that we are all due a massive refund is no different: "Kevin Bowler, Telecom' head of consumer marketing, said the company had discovered the problem a week ago which lead them to a decision to credit the monthly fee back." They discovered they had a problem last week? My first communication with them on the failings of Go Large was dated 29/10/06, as we were transferred over to go large from the 16th of October onwards - not the first week of December as Telecom are now claiming. My speed on browsing and downloading had fallen from the 256 kbytes a second which I had been getting consistently since the upgrade to a 2 megabyte service in 2004, to less than 40 kilobits/sec. Yes thats kilobits. Sometimes browsing was worse than it had ever been the appalling days of dial up in the mid-90s! Downloading was plainly impossible. After a couple of weeks of being ignored lied to and hung up on I got the service back to dial up speeds or slightly better. One time early in November I waited on hold for 80 minutes only to have the helpdesk operator hang up on me as soon as I told him the problem. I wasnt shouting or swearing. I was being calm in order to get some sort of response. I rang back waited on hold for only 35 minutes and that help desk operator tried to help but couldnt.
Like many others at that time I was told by the helpdesk to do a speed test. This was a complex, frustrating and pointless task which took a number of days to complete but it gave Xtra some breathing room during which time we could be dismissed with "Have you finished your speed test?" as if we were recalcitrant schoolchildren instead of some of Xtra's most longstanding and highest paying private customers. Of course the only allowed target for the speed test was Telecoms own server which was revved up so that its speed was totally different from the speeds xtra allowed to any other server, but even then it couldnt cope and after repeatedly telling you that your were communicating at greater than 3 mbytes/sec after a while it would buckle at the knees and fess up to the same 30 kbit/sec of everywhere else. Anyway toward the end of December by speed was managed back up to 110-160kbytes/sec where it has remained unless it isnt. In which case 2 or 3 times a week it drops to 30 kbytes/sec. Too slow to browse a halfway decent site with pix and scripts. Too slow for VoIP duplexing much less video conferencing.
The thing which really angers me about all this is I rang Telecom before the introduction of Go Large to clarify some of the blurry bits. I had stayed on 256 kbytes/sec download after many others had increased to 400kbytes/sec (the old 3 megabit downloads) because I had a 192 kbit upload -a hangover from the early braodband plans which Xtra had put out. Xtra had refused to increase my download speed unless I agreed to a drop in my upload speed which I was reluctant to do. Therefore I rang Xtra to ask exactly what these vague new speeds would mean for me. Since my upload speed was going to be dropped to 128 kbits/sec against my wishes as the 192 uploads were no longer supported, what download speed would I get? The 2 megabyte or the 3 megabyte? "As fast as your line will allow" I was told. I knew my line would allow 3 megabytes because I had once tested it at that speed with Xtra so I asked the salesman if that would be the new speed.
When he became as vague as all hell I asked him if that meant Go Large customers would have their speeds reduced to lower than those of the other data limited plans. "No" he said, "definitely not. We have been assured by the bosses that only those who transgress and download more than 700 megabytes between 4pm and midnight will have speed restrictions."
Heath
I went onto the GO-LARGE plan when it was first offered and have been constantly disappointed with the near dial-up speeds ever since. When I first went onto broadband almost 2 years ago, XTRA delivered an incredibly fast connection. But it has slowly deteriorated into a ridiculously slow connection. I will be using my refund to sign up at one of XTRAs competitors, but I doubt it will make much difference. The government should do more to push New Zealand broadband technology to the next step.
Duncan
I just tried the Xtra "speed test" available on their site. According to them I can download data directly from a server at a rate of 11,304 kB/sec. At the same time I am downloading a small music file from the web at a real rate of around 10 kB/sec. So why is this 1000 times slower? The test shows there is nothing wrong with my computer or connections (all done by Xtra), and I am close to an Auckland exchange (with wiring by Telecom). So how can they insinuate that the slowness is my fault, as has been done when I called the Helpdesk?
Katherine Brydon
Telecom is the company people love to hate. The investment in broadband in New Zealand with its current population is huge. People want first rate services and dont want to pay for it. I think Telecom like most big companies invest in areas where they will make money. Any business would be foolish to invest in areas where there is little or no return. With regards to the broadband plans. Credit should be given that Telecom has offered to compensate their customers. If people think they can get a better deal and better broadband then they should take their business elsewhere. I would like to see how many of these customers are getting a better deal with other providers. Vodofone which is a multi billon company is interested in making a profit and yet New Zealanders dont have a problem when their money is sent overseas. Yet expects Telecom to provide services to their customers for reduced rates. Roll on competition.
Christine
I am disheartened totally with this so called broadband network. The speed is no better than the dialup I originally had and is slower than the dial up computer I use at work. I am only approx 2 to 3k/ms away from the exchange so why? I am on the explorer plan to allow for surfing and downloads and still the service is crap. I am seriously considering changing my supplier to see if I can get a quicker service and better deal pricewise.
Eric Heynen
From a 10GB cap I moved to the unlimited and max speed option. What a huge mistake. My service degraded and still regularly keeps disconnecting.My data transfer speed has dropped and I am lucky to connect to some websites after 7:00pm. I even had a letter from Telecom confirming this with a note saying I cant switch back and another option was change suppliers. Excellent customer service Telecom. In fact it is faster for me to connect via wireless to my neighbour (Also on Telecom Xtra) and surf the web rather than using my own connection. What a joke.
Alison
It took 7 weeks for Telecom to get a phone line to my house after turning up one October to connect my new house, despite being asked in August to do the work. After having lived without broadband or a home phone without so much as a credit on our Vodafone mobiles from Telecom (because we werent existing customers - despite their failure to provide service in August). I finally got connected and ordered my broadband service from Ihug. 3 week wait for Telecom. Can that. Phoned Telecom, got a modem next day and connection. the modem was faulty. Returned modem, got a new one. Slower than dial up on their old explorer plan. Phoned and complained. After blaming my computer & the electricans wiring in the house, they sent a technician out to check the line, the resistors in the demarcation box were stuffed, despite the demarc being new, so they replaced them. As the demarc was outside the boundary of my property, they told me I wouldnt have to pay, but invoiced me $160 anyway. It took a week to get it credited and I had to prove the demarc was outside my boundary. When the plans changed over, I switched to the faster plan for downloading podcasts etc, thinking it would be better, but its pretty much the same. I look forward to the refund. Wont have to pay my telecom bill for a month. Nice. More nice considering I just signed up to Vodafone for two years and wont have to pay them for 3 months either.
JK
I find that Go Large customers getting a refund, while is good for them, does nothing to alleviate the frustration and lack of usability experienced by other customers. I have found that Telecoms (as fast as your phone line allows) broadband unusable during the week between when I come home from work and till at least 10pm. Ironically, when everyone was limited to 256k the whole experience was far more usable than now when we have 50 times this speed available - in reality this is slower than dialup during peak times.
Even the Telecom Broadband PRO account at twice the price of Go Large, slows down during peak times. So instead of paying more for internet access to get more data available everyone should have just gone into the Go Large scheme and get it for free.
Its time for Telecom to take responsibility, and sort out their Broadband services for all their customers.
Matt
I went onto Xtra go large to give myself that little bit of extra capacity. I have had nothing but time outs and slow transfer rates since going on this plan. I opted to go back onto my previous plan - "xtra adventure" but was told this plan is no longer available. Ii used to work for Xtra on the helpdesk many years ago and know this is par for the course. They take a long time to resolve problems like this and I am considering switching ISPs. I have sent speed test results and called numerous times and have not been offered any credit or explanation. Its not a wonder a lot of I.T. People I know refer to telecom as Telescum.
Fredtan
Why does Telecom struggle to keep up with the technology and changes in the local market and yet has the money to invest on other telecommunication companies overseas? Where is their priority? They are literally taking our money overseas and conning us that they have the best systems for us. The local telecommunications market should be opened to other competitors since Telecom is so inefficient.
Stuart Vidanage
I was on the Telecom Explorer plan from September to January when the performance of the plan was so horrific I changed to the "go Large plan." Now I have called Telecom and asked them to advise me if the Explorer plan was constrained by the same traffic management "service" as the Go Large plan. They claim it was not but remember how bad the performance was of the service, I think they again are not telling the whole truth. Was anyone else on the Explorer plan only to find you needed to switch as the performance was so bad? I was only surfing websites on the explorer plan and my connection was throttled back to Dial up speeds all during the Christmas break making me a sad customer. Another example of not getting what you pay for by Telecom.
Go to Xnet and sign up for their broadband and VOIP service and save yourselves heaps of money on a phone line rental and go with their Broadband service, it is much better than the Telecom branded ADSL service. And tell them I sent ya!
Andrew
Go Large had problems before the 8th December date they mention in their release. I was on it, but switched to another ISP in late November because I had found the slow speeds so frustrating. It had been like that for at least all of November. When my new ISP came online it was like night and day, suddenly my internet worked properly again!
Disconnected
I cannot connect to a Telecom broadband plan (at reasonable expense) and never will be able to do so because I live rurally. I am using a service provided by one of Telecoms more progressive competitors (i.e. not a reseller of Telecom's service). I think this just highlights the disParatai in the telecommunications market. I wonder how Mrs Gibbs connection is?
Che Brown
I have been on the plan from the start and have found it to be very slow. It is not so much the download speed but the browsing speed which has annoyed me. I understand the traffic management but the overall internet package is not up to standard. I will however stay with telecom xtra on the Go Large plan if the browsing and download speed is Max outside the peak times of 4pm - 12am.
Peter Jones
The performance of my Go Large internet was seriously degraded from what it was before it was "unleashed". I just got fed up with waiting for hours trying to get through to the helpdesk so I changed providers, got a service like I had and have had no more problems. Various internet forums indicated I was not alone. They indicated it was just getting too hard to try and resolve. I guess Theresa Gattung was right when she said every telco uses confusion as a marketing tool.
Mikos
I upgraded from my previous broadband plan to the go large plan when it was first released. The day after the upgrade occurred, I noticed the speed had more than halved from my previous plan. In fact at peak usage it was slower than dial up. Given the way this service was marketed I am still very angry with the service provided by Telecom. This refund should be treated as a small first step towards compensation. The only thing they can do to satisfy me (and I suspect many of their other customers) is to deliver the advertised service. Surely you dont have to pay a CEO millions of dollars to realise that?
Brian Foose
I was Switched my plan to the go large but ever since my speed is slower then Dial up. After about 30 calls to Telecom. everyone told me it was my phone line, router, network etc. According to them, everything is wrong in my house but nothing is wrong with their service. I try to explain to them my broadband connection was find until the switch over. They didnt think so. They ask me to do all sort of test over 3 days on my own time. Then someone from their support team told me word for word "we will not help you anymore." Thats the end of that (note they said will not). I got really unhappy with them after years of business I have with them. I decided to go with Orcon. Even that Telecom made it very difficult for me to switch over to Orcon (delay responding to requests and that) but the day I switch to Orcon. everything went great. 5.5MB speed test peak time. now Telecom is coming forward to say its their fault all along. I say too little too late. What about all of us thats with you month ago and has been forced to switch to other ISP. What do we get for the crap service we got when we used to use Xtra?
Helen Smyth
On Monday Telecom rang and as a result of what they promised, we signed up to the GoLarge Plan. Today (Thursday)our internet speed was reduced to dialup which was absolutely hopeless and virtually meant we couldnt work as most of what we do is using the internet. The only good news is that when I rang they were able to revert us back to the original plan almost immediately and the faster internet speed was returned. What I cant understand is that they obviously already knew about these issues with GoLarge, so what was the point in transferring us over to it?
Tarn Mendoza
I went from a capped 10 gigabyte connection to the go large plan being advised by a Telecom representative that it was best for me as I was consistently going over my monthly allowance. As soon as I connected, I noticed a significant reduction in my download speeds. I was getting speeds no better than a dial up connection. Telecom wasted 3 months of our time handing us around from help desk to help desk and person to person, all of whom would conduct the same line and speed tests all to no avail they even claimed it was the modem and sent out a replacement and still no difference in line speeds. None of the Telecom employees I spoke to had any idea what the problem was or how to fix it. I even spoke to some that although being employed by Telecom were experiencing the same hassles that I was which I thought was ridiculous. We were on the Go large plan for 3 months solid and our download speeds never went any higher than 10kbps 5 kilobytes faster than dial up nowhere near the 150 times faster they were advertising on TV. They even told us that they had handed our case over to an advanced technician whom we were advised would ring us within a week. 2 weeks later we phoned and asked if the advanced technician was walking down from Auckland as it was taking so long, In the end out of sheer frustration and disgust I cut both the phone line and the internet and signed up instead with Telstra clear and I have never had a problem since. For 3 months I paid for a service that they did not provide and all they offered was one month free service which was by then pointless as I had already switched to another ISP and I pay by automatic payment so I was always ahead of time on my payments and they offered nothing to me for this run around Telecom disgust me and i refuse to have anything to do with this company again.
Synove Eldby
This refund is definitely warranted. The broadband speeds have been slow and the service not worth the money we are paying. Its about time.
Marker
Can anybody where Telecom got the date December 8 from. From the beginning on there were problems with Go Large. The $130-160 is a figure with which Telecom hopes to tackle any judgment and even further fines from NZ governmental bodies. If I like to maintain the same uasge as I built up over the past months on Go LArge I am forced to go to the Telecom $99.95 plan, twice what i pay today. I wish i could move to another provider but we live rural and getting broadband was already a struggle and fight for months until one at Telecom realized that it was not such a bad idea to share a cabinet for user from older switches. I do not want to do this again. If I go the cheaper plan I am charged $0.02 per MB that i go over the limit. That is twenty times more than at providers like Xnet who give you plans with a charge per MB from the first moment onwards. Xnet buys its bandwidth from Telecom Wholesale. How can they offer it so cheap when Telecom Retail offers it only twenty times that price? I can imagine that Theresa Gattung had looked forward to a more honorable departure. Will this hand out to the customers have any influence on her farewell handshake of several millions?
Stewart
The services is very variable - there are long waits for clicks to become reality. Better than dial up, but not spectacular. Does not encourage further investment in Telecoms services. A loyal 100 per cent Telecom customer, but I do not feel well treated, tell them so in their surveys and calls, but it makes no difference.
Kevin Ford
Glad to see Telcom is admitting its failure with Broadband Golive as I was starting to think it was my PC at fault with download speed and just screen opening being slower than dial up. This is just a typical failure to upgrade systems and provide a sevice that the majority of the western world now takes for granted, perhaps they should look after customers more than share holders returns.
Kevin Wang
We have subscribed the Go Large since December. I have two flatmats live with me in the house. We all expected that if we choose this plan we will have a better experience when surf on the internet. But that didnt happen. We didnt get xtra down load limit or speed except the xtra fee charged by Telecom.
Dave
I supposedly "upgraded" to Go Large. It was slower then dial up so I switched to Ihug.
Chris Burcher
We have a long standing distrust and dislike of Telecom and this comes as no surprise. As your correspondent commented, something is horribly wrong with the culture of a place that consistently, arrogantly and without any show of contrition, routinely over promises, under-delivers and overcharges. We have had to put up with broadband overcharges, no broadband service in Albany (one of the fastest growing suburbs of Auckland), duplicate charges for dial-up access, utterly disastrous reconnections after address changes, and on and on…..a monthly call to Telecom to sort out billing errors has become routine. I lay the blame at the feet of a government who despite recommendations to unbundle the copper loop and open the wider telecommunications sector up to more vigorous competition, were sucked in by well paid Telecom lobbyists.
Andrew N
Its all very well giving a credit to the Go Large users , but what about all the other broadband users on slightly lower plans who over the same timeframe had to put up with constant server interruptions/ crashes and upload/download speeds that were on a par with dial up speed. All because the powers of be at Telecom committed the majority bandwith to Go Large customers , overloaded the whole network and made all to suffer.
C & L Taylor
Describing this as broadband is an absolute joke!! Unless your on the net at something like 2am in the morning, its pathetic! We had broadband back in Australia with Telstra (prior to moving here just over two years ago)and it was all fibre optic cable, so the high-speed was always there regardless of whether traffic was high or low. We are in Pukekohe township and we've lost count of the number of times that our connection has even gone down! Darn frustrating! My husband often works from home and high-speed internet access is absolutely critical for the work he does, but sometimes we feel we are on the "slowest boat to China" with it. Is Telecom here going to upgrade the network with fibre optic cable? Cos you better hurry up and do so otherwise NZ will definitely be known as the technological backwater of the world! NZ always used to be one of the first places with new gadgetry, etc., even before Australia, What has happened?
Sam
I have been on Go Large for a few months. It is not true broadband at all. Sure, it is faster than dial up but it is too slow to be called true broadband. I complained to Telecom several times but they just fob me off. They say that I am getting the fastest speed my exchange will allow but I know that is not true as my business is on the same exchange and the broadband speed is about 4 times faster there. It seems they are still using confusion as their main marketing .
Anthea Toheriri
We are a telecom broadband user and find it very frustrating sometimes when we go to use the internet and it displays that it cannot connect to the web. Sometimes this can take up to 5 - 10 minutes before it decides to connect. Very frustrating! Also when we signed up for broadband go large we were told that we were to pay $49.00 a month including landline to have this service. Upon getting this service we have been since told that it is $49.00 plus phone line rental. If we had known this and had the service explained to us properly we may not have got it. But we didnt cancel it because that would have cost us about $190.00 to cancel before the year is up!
Rob
It is nice that Telecom have recognised their mistake, as admitting mistakes, especially ones that cost a large sum of money. I for one, will be happy to receive my refund (more so because I am a student), and look forward to further refunds if such average levels of service continue. However, I shall look forward to near acceptable levels of broadband service in the very near future.
Josh
I am on the Go Large plan as a result of Xtras advertisement. The message had too much hidden issue and the whole experience can be summarised in one phrase, ie customers are conned! Xtra introduced the plan with many hidden issues that would surely dissatisfied their customers. Xtra knew this but went along to cause detriment to their customers. Is this a fair business practice? Xtra robbed its customers with pride. What a shame.
David Samuel
Since they switched to the new plan, I have lost service several times as well as speeds dropping to below dialup speed. so their great improvement has been a giant step towards frustration and the stone age of internet connections. Every time I called to complain, they said that everything was perfectly fine and there was nothing they could do. A real brush off that keeps NZ at the top of the worst country for customer service in the developed world.
Robert Watson
I am with Woosh Wireless for my DSL paying $50 monthly for the same conditions as Go Large (whoosh call this a different name) I am facing the same issues . Do you think that Woosh will refund me as well?
Andrew
Why would the Government step in to help? So we have to pay less which means less tax for them? I dont think so. This applies for most things they do, well don't do for that matter. They need that tax to fund the pledge cards.. Do we need to watch the Telecon advert on youtube again? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0oy1eiyOZY
Simon Riley
Speaking of refunds, late last year I had a letter from Telecom stating the service I hadd been paying for was not being delivered! They had performed a line test near my house and apparently I had been paying for a fast speed (3Mbps) and my line was only able to receive less than 1Mbps! As a result - they offered a few options: 1) Put me on a new plan that is cheaper from today. 2) A full refund since the day I signed up! I choice number 2 and changed service provider. They refunded 1 and a half years Invoices. I had wondered why I never got to connect at full speed, but they had said it was most likely traffic or something. I guess to offer this full refund it must have been quite a serious issue. They said not that many people were affected by this, but I wonder?
Chris Rust
At long last Telecom have admitted they have a problem. All the time I was trying to convince Telecom there was an issue (along with thousands of other customers) they were making out that I was the only customer with the issue and that the issue was with my equipment. They deliberately misled me, wasted countless hours of my time and quite frankly no refund is going to restore my confidence in them. I am taking my broadband business elsewhere and the moment I able I am moving my phone service to another company too. Goodbye Telecom!
Chris Barham
I was a relatively happy Broadband customer until I moved to my newly built house in a new sub-division. The estate developer had to pay or contribute for Telecom to install phone line infrastructure for the new houses. I can even see the brand new road side routing box from my patio. However, I am on dial-up because Telecom have not invested in the hardware within the box to provide Broadband. I had to register my interest to receive Broadband on their website. I was then told that when enough people have registered interest, they would then schedule the work to upgrade the brand new street box.
Hayley May
Broadband? Hey after 5 weeks of modems going missing in the post, testing, technicians, changing my phone number, speaking to hundreds of different people and much much more I have find out I cant actually get broadband. Drr, could have told me in the first place as seems to be the case with many other Telecom customers and do they care about any of anyones issues? No! As it has been said once the competition comes up to play they'll be in trouble. I know I will be transferring to another company as soon as Telecom releases my phone number.
Alastair Hutchens
I read with interest this morning about the decision by Telecom to refund those customers (like me) who have been woefully misled about the benefits of migrating to the Go Large broadband offer.
There are too many companies in this country who consistently "over promise and under deliver" - but nobody does so on a scale like Telecom seems to delight in! As one of our most profitable companies, it is nothing short of utter arrogance to spend millions of dollars (customers money!) on making expensive television commercials, airing them (one of our biggest advertisers)- all designed to entice us to spend more money with them and then woefully fail to deliver.Telecom have every reason to fear competition. Their competitors, if they are any good, simply have to deliver on what
