Telecom ditches JetStream Starter product

By PAUL BRISLEN

Telecom is to shut down its high speed internet product JetStream Starter from the end of September.

Existing customers of the product will have until the end of the year to migrate to a new service before the product is shut down entirely.

JetStream Starter connections run at 128 kbps, roughly double the speed of a dial-up connection, and has long been popular with those high-end users of the internet because of its higher traffic limits.

JetStream Starter began life as JetStart in January 2001. Customers were able to pay a flat fee each month to receive the service and weren't faced with paying extra for exceeding their traffic limits. Telecom's full-speed JetStream product has some of the lowest traffic limits in the OECD, so customers who exceed the limits were forced to pay extra to use the service.

In September Telecom introduced a new service, JetStream Home, which ran at double the speed of JetStream Starter. However that plan wasn't as popular as Telecom hoped and it introduced a new range, JetStream Surf, with download speeds of 256 kbps and upload speeds of 128 kbps, in March this year. The three JetStream Surf plans, with traffic limits of 1 GB (gigabyte), 3 GB and 10 GB have proven to be hugely popular and Telecom points to the surge in JetStream Surf subscriptions as one of the reasons for discontinuing the JetStream Starter product.

Telecom ran into controversy in September last year when it was revealed to be quoting JetStream Starter customer numbers towards its stated target of 100,000 broadband customers by the end of 2004, despite defining JetStream Starter as not being broadband.

Customers are asked to contact their ISP to discuss migrating to another product.