Simon Hendery: Dream of super speed goes on hold till next year

The call from Telecom came as a pleasant surprise. The company's sales team were offering me a new wireless broadband modem for free.

It would allow me to access the new souped-up version of over-the-phone-line broadband, ADSL2+.

The only catch was I'd have to commit to remaining a Telecom customer for two years.

It wasn't the free element of the offer that caused the surprise, but the fact that they were offering me the faster technology at all.

While the company has been spending up large to upgrade its broadband capacity by installing new equipment in exchanges and roadside cabinets, an earlier check on their website - www.telecom.co.nz/broadband/speed/adsl2 - had shown our house wouldn't be ADSL2+ enabled until a new cabinet appeared in the neighbourhood around July next year.

I put this to the call centre guy. His response was that work on the upgrade had been progressing faster than planned, so it looked like my street had been two-plussed ahead of schedule.

It sounded plausible. His well paid boss, Paul Reynolds, has been talking a lot recently about Telecom's bold infrastructural investment so, as the advertising front man for the company's new mobile network says, I decided I'd better put them to the test.

The modem arrived by courier just a couple of days later and was up and running quickly and easily thanks to an easy-to-use installation CD that worked without a hitch.

I'd been keeping an eye on the speed of my mark-one ADSL previous connection using the useful website www.speedtest.net. It had been creeping up nicely over the past couple of years or so as Telecom tweaked the network.

We used to get download speeds of up to 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps) on a good day, but lately top speed has reached 4.7Mbps - slightly ahead of what the typical Telecom customer was experiencing, according to the SpeedTest site.

I stress that's top speed. As most home broadband users know, connectivity speed suffers at peak times, generally evenings, when more people are surfing and downloading.

In theory ADSL2+ users can experience speeds of up to 25Mbps, but that is only in ideal conditions, for example where the connection is very close to the local phone exchange.

Unfortunately my experience wasn't anything to get Richard Hammond excited. On day one I inched up to a download speed of 5.3Mbps briefly, but then found I was back to almost identical results to before the new modem.

A call back to Telecom provided some insights but no definitive answer about what was going on. They checked my line and assured me it was 2+ enabled.

They reminded me that the new technology's speed capacity was dependent on the distance from the exchange or roadside cabinet. Being more than about 2km from the 2+ network gear is likely to mean it is ineffective. The problem was they couldn't tell me how far away I was.

I hadn't seen a new cabinet pop up in the neighbourhood, and as far as I know the main exchange is some distance away so it looked like on this occasion the website had been right and the sales team had called the wrong customer.

My dream of ADSL2+ super speed may just have to go on hold until next July.

I've decided to keep the new modem anyway. They told me I could send it back within a month to avoid the two-year sign-up clause.

Call me hopelessly optimistic, but I'm hoping the first guy I spoke to was right, that the network upgrade is proceeding ahead of schedule and it could only be weeks or months before that shiny new cabinet arrives down the road.

I'm also - like most telco customers - a victim of inertia. I know I won't get around to swapping to another broadband supplier anytime soon, even if someone else comes along offering me a faster speed.

Unfortunately for the other providers, customer inertia is one of Telecom's major marketing advantages. I know this because I've just agreed to stay one of their customers for two years simply because I can't be bothered sending back a device that does exactly the same thing as the previous device they sent me.