Great service, but the cost blew us away

By CHRIS BARTON

What Telecom chief Theresa Gattung needs to know about fast internet access.

Dear Theresa,

I was forced back into the slow lane last month. I'm very depressed, but at least the stress has gone.

My family and I have had a wonderful five months using your JetStream service for fast internet access - no worldwide wait for web pages to arrive, new software downloading in a blink of an eye, and you can actually watch a streaming video without a jerky picture and that buffering nonsense.

Instant on and always there - brilliant. Which is why I'm so upset I've had to give it up.

It wasn't just the exorbitant cost - an average of $185.47 a month (not counting the $30 a month for renting the modem or the $38.29 a month for my homeline rental).

No, it wasn't just that my fat pipe added up to a whopping $253.76 a month - and more than doubled my phone bill. The real problem was the stress - never knowing what my monthly bill might be.

Never knowing whether the kids, my partner or myself might have got carried away on some download, web game or internet video and I would end up with a bill for $500. Or, worse still, that some hacker or virus might have got control of our connection and we would have to pay for his/her/its free surfing.

Yes, we kept an eye on the meter - how we came to loathe that web page.

And thank you for the courteous call to tell us we were about to exceed our 600-megabyte limit - how we came to hate that call.

But we still managed to get through almost double the number of megabytes allowed.

Our monthly average was, in fact, 1.08 gigabytes - with a high of 1.24 gigabytes and a low of 893 megabytes.

Yes, I know that sounds a lot, but you'd be surprised how easy it is for an internet family to chew through the bytes - especially when the internet becomes such a pleasure to use.

Your JetStream service really is very good - so fast, so easy, so convenient. Which is why I'm so despondent.

I suspect that as chief executive of Telecom you're far too busy to worry about my predicament, but I thought you just might want to hear from one of your high-value customers.

After all, you have been getting more than $400 a month from our household, which I'm sure has been helpful with the ARPUs (average revenue per user).

It's bad enough that we've had to downgrade to the JetStart service. The fixed price of $64.90 a month for as much internet we can use is a comfort, though. At least we now know what our bill is going to be.

But I think calling it JetStart is misleading. JetStop might be closer to the mark. Much of the time it feels only a little faster than dial-up modem speed.

Having developed a taste for the lightning-fast JetStream, I can tell you the whole family really notice the difference. We now crave speed.

But to add insult to injury, you've also made us pay for taking the slow lane - adding a $50 "downgrade" charge to our bill. We are hurt. Why on earth would you treat high-value customers like that?

Theresa, I really think you've got this fast internet thing all wrong. You shouldn't be restricting my family's internet enjoyment like this.

Internet on a megabyte meter is like living under a repressive regime. And restricting us to 128 kilobits per second (Kbps) is like telling us we can walk but not run. I'm sure you know that by OECD standards 128Kbps doesn't even make the grade as a broadband service.

I had a look at what some of the other OECD countries provide in broadband. You must be proud that Telecom has one of the fastest offerings around - surpassed in theoretical upper speed only by Korea.

But aren't you ashamed that the monthly charge for JetStream is nearly the highest in the world - surpassed only by Hungary and Turkey?

It's true. When I take my monthly average of $185.47 and adjust it using OECD purchasing power parity (PPP) conversion rates, JetStream is horrendously expensive.

I averaged the monthly rates of Korea, Japan, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Germany and the United States to check.

With PPP adjustments, it came to around $60 a month. I'm sure you know there's no megabyte cap in those countries.

But what annoys me even more, Theresa, is that at the flick of a switch you're able to make our phone line sizzle at something approaching two megabits per second - although I reckon the best we ever got was more around the one megabit per second mark. Still, that suited us fine.

With all that spare capacity, not to mention a terribly underused Southern Cross cable, why don't you offer different grades of unlimited service - 256Kbps, 512Kbs, 768Kbps and 1024Kbps, etc?

I reckon you would see a big surge in uptake - much more than the measly 16,000 business and residential JetStream connections you had at the end of June.

It would also give customers the freedom to choose how fast they wanted - or could afford - to go.

Affectionately,

Chris.

* chris_barton@nzherald.co.nz