So… you’re a Bigpipe customer, deeply and passionately in love with our unlimited data and no contract plans.

You want to tell the world all about Bigpipe, share the love with your friends, colleagues, and anybody who will listen.

We figured we’d make it easy for you. We’ve made it so you can get $20 for every friend you refer to Bigpipe, leaving you with more cash each month to spend on the important things in life, like streaming movies, Sour Skittles, Burger Rings, and Steam sales. Oh, and whoever you refer will get $20 credit as well. Nice!

So, here, in three easy steps, is how to get free broadband by doing virtually nothing.

Step 1:

Log in to your Bigpipe account on our website, and you’ll see a lovely little widget like this.

Each Bigpipe customer has a unique link (it’s right there in the middle of the widget. Yours will have a bunch of letters and numbers after where it says “referralCode=”).

Step 2:

Simply share that link (just click “Copy link”) with your friends, acquaintances, colleagues, family, lovers, mortal enemies.  Anybody, really.

Stef M here clicked our handy Twitter link to tell his followers all about Bigpipe. Good for you, Stef M! You go, Stef M!

Step 3:

……. Profit?

That’s right. There is no step 3. You don’t have to do anything else.

How does it work?

Anybody who clicks on your link will be taken to a special version of the  Bigpipe homepage with an extra little message that looks like this:

If your friend/acquaintance/enemy sign ups using that link they’ll earn $20 for you in Bigpipe credit. They will also earn an extra $20 in credit for themselves too, just for being your friend/acquaintance/enemy – and that’s on top of any other offer we might have at the time too.

It all gets automatically applied to your account – you don’t have to put in any special claim, and they don’t have to mention your name or anything.

Much like our broadband, our Refer A Friend service is unlimited – there’s no limit to how many people you can refer and how much Bigpipe credit you can earn.

So how do you get people to use that link?

We’ve made that part nice and easy too. We provide a handy button to post it directly to your Facebook page or to your Twitter account. There is also a button to copy the link and paste it anywhere on the internet – preferably where people will see it, and especially people who might be unhappy with their current ISP and in need of some Bigpipe love.

We’re sure you’re smart enough to figure out where unhappy customers of other ISPs might hang out on the internets.

The more people who see the link, the more likely you are to get those dollars flowing. It only takes a few referrals to pay your entire bill for a month.

FAQs

How many times can I use this?
As many as you like.

How many friends can I refer?
As many as you can.

How much Bigpipe credit can I earn?
As much as possible.

How awesome is this?
Very.

A few weeks ago, Bigpipe decided to give away a Mystery Prize.

The actual mystery prize was a Chromecast. It wasn’t that mysterious, actually; we said what it was in our Facebook post.

But we decided to have some fun with it. We advertised the tantalising mystery of our mystery prize competition with a picture of some mysterious things. A whale. A bee. A lobster. An escalator. These perfectly normal things were the first to come to mind when we were Google image searching. What, that doesn’t happen to you?

The competition went reasonably normally. At Bigpipe, we make a point of rewarding the best competition entries, rather than just relying on random selection. True to form, there were some excellent entries.

There was this guy, who entered a poem.

Naturally, many people expressed a preference for our ridiculous not-prizes.

Someone else wanted a whale, for reasons.

It was all going so well. Then this happened.

Challenge accepted.

Come on…

A bit of peer pressure does the job.

We’d done our research. It turns out there is a company – actually several companies – in New Zealand who will courier live crayfish to your doorstep. 

So we sent live crayfish to a grouper of our customers on porpoise. Cray-zy? We think this is of-fish-cially the first time any broadband company has done this. We think our hearts are in the right plaice, and we had a reely good time while our customers waited with baited breath, even thought they probably thought it was a red herring up until the last minute. It also gave us the chance to make a carp-load of fish puns. I mean, kahawai not? We know, we know. You’re thinking “Oh, for cod’s sake. I don’t come to your site to trawl through puns. Fin-ish already.” Well, maybe we’ll do batter next time. Haddock enough of this yet? Nah, they’re kraken you up. We’re having a whale of a time. But we’re kind of floundering now. Dolphinately can’t keep this up. Time to pike. Maybe we’ll move to Invercar-gill.

Happily, our customers snappered it right up. They liked it so much they sent photos.

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Why this (probably) shouldn’t be used to compare ISPs in NZ

We reckon these rankings are a good indication of New Zealand’s improving internet situation – and that it’s getting better all the time.

Your thoughts? Let us know in the comments!

So you want to change ISPs? Makes sense. Your current ISP probably loads you up with stuff like contracts and on-hold-forever call centres and you’ve decided you want a breath of fresh air from the Bigpipe.

But you are understandably nervous. You’ve heard horror stories from other people about how their switch left them without internet for weeks or continuing to pay their old ISP months after switching.

So we’re here to show you the right way to switch ISPs, minimise downtime and costs, and get you up and running with your new provider (Bigpipe, right?)

Doing It Right

In a few simple steps, this is the right way to go about switching ISPs.*

Do NOT start by contacting your current ISP. If you do this, it’ll screw everything up
1. Place your order with Bigpipe (or the ISP of your choice, which is obviously Bigpipe)
– If your current ISP is one of those annoying ones that requires 30 days notice, (which is most of them – so check!) then you can ask us to connect you, say, 35 days in the future so you don’t end up being double billed – no worries, we’ll wait.
– If you just want to get on Bigpipe goodness ASAP, then choose a convenient date for that (just bear in mind your current ISP might charge you an extra 30 days even though they aren’t providing you a service, just because they like free money and putting ‘gotchas’ in their contract)

other isps be like

2. Bigpipe will come back to you in a day or two with a confirmed date. At this point, your connection date is set with Chorus and it is now not possible for your current ISP to accidentally block your move.
3. You can now contact your current ISP and say “Hello Mr ISP, I’m switching to Bigpipe in 30 days. please consider this my notice period. I do NOT want you to disconnect me before that time.” (We’d recommend doing this via email – since that way you have it in writing if they screw it up.)

Look, a cartoon explanation, because cartoons!

Important: All the above is for like-for-like technology movements – moving from ADSL or VDSL (copper) to copper, or fibre to fibre.

Moving from copper to fibre is a little different. If you are moving from copper on ISP A to fibre on ISP B, then things get a bit trickier – it’s very difficult to guarantee an installation date for UFB. The safest course of action is to wait until your get UFB up and running and then give notice to your old ISP – it will cost you a little bit more in double charges, but we think that’s better than going without internet.

Now, read on for the more technical explanation.

The Easy Way
As you probably know, the series of tubes that deliver the internet to your house is owned in NZ by a company called Chorus. (There are exceptions to this with fibre broadband, but for the purposes of this article it means pretty much the same thing.)

When you want to get broadband you place an order with your desired ISP (probably Bigpipe) and they then place the order with Chorus.
Then about 4-6 days later, a friendly Chorus technician pootles on out to the phone exchange in his trendy Chorus van, moves some cables and stuff, and then you have internet.

However, when you are dealing with a line that already has internet from another provider sitting on it, things have the potential to get hairy. We’ll need to delve a wee bit into Telco lingo here – but don’t worry, it should all become clear soon enough.

Basically, each line is only ever allowed to have one single unfinished piece of work at a time. (called an ‘open service order’ in telco land). This could be a fault that hasn’t been fixed yet, or a disconnection request for a future date – it doesn’t matter.
Provided your line doesn’t have an existing ‘open service order’ then your new ISP can place a ‘transition’ order with Chorus. This means the technician goes out to the exchange and does the whole job at once – disconnecting you from ISP A, and connecting you to ISP B. This means your downtime should be less than an hour. Nice! That’s what we want.

The Road to Failville
However, if there is an open service order on the line, this blocks any new orders from being placed until that order is completed and you will be on a path to having no internets
This means ISP B cannot even place their order (and start the 4-6 day process) until you are fully disconnected from ISP A. That means at least 4-6 days of having no internet. Boo!

So why would there be an open service order on the line? Unfortunately the most likely answer is that you did what you thought was the right thing and gave your current ISP their 30 day notice of disconnection. Then they decided to place a ‘disconnection order’ (dated 30 days in the future). You didn’t know it at the time, but this action stops your new ISP from even placing their order.

(Also, a quick word about phone lines: they can complicate things a bit. Or a lot. Bigpipe is a naked internet provider, meaning we don’t offer phone lines as part of our internet packages. If you switch to Bigpipe and don’t specifically request otherwise with your current ISP, you will lose your phone line when you switch. If you want to keep your old phone line, you’ll have to do so by organising it with your current provider after you switch to us. We wholeheartedly recommend not bothering with a phone line at all, if you can avoid it – just use your mobile, or if you want, VOIP.)

Movin on up
All this shenanigans about open service orders is also why moving house can be such a pain in the ass. If you are moving into your new place just a day or two after the current tenants are moving out, then it is virtually impossible for your ISP (any ISP!) to get you up and running on the day you move in. The existing tenant will have an open service order (a ‘move address’) and your ISP can’t place your order until that is completed – which means you probably won’t get internet until a week or so after that. It doesn’t matter how much notice you give your ISP – there is nothing they can do but wait it out.

You may be saying to yourself, “well, that sucks!” – and we completely agree. We are working with Chorus to try and sort this out. It sucks for our customers, and sucks for us. It also means we are paying for two Chorus visits (one to disconnect and another to connect), when really it only needs one (to do the disconnect and reconnect at the same time). But in the meantime, if you follow the advice here, you’ll find switching ISPs to be a breeze, rather than a hurricane of frustration and no-internet-fury it can otherwise become.

And now, of course, you can go ahead and switch to Bigpipe 😀

Here at Bigpipe Towers, we’re all about the customer service. That’s why we have in-house customer support. I can actually see the customer care team from where I sit. Look at them. Making sure that customers get served. What a good bunch! We’d like to showcase a few of the people who work hard to keep Bigpipe awesome, so here’s the first of a series of staff profiles – featuring Enzo!

Your Name Here: Enzo

A/S/L? 21/m/auckland

Tell us a bit about yourself: I was born, did school stuff out West Auckland ways, did University stuff at UoA and then I joined the team at at the start of this year (2015).

What do you get up to outside of work? I like going on adventures and finding somewhere new to go! At the moment I’m getting back into scuba diving now that summer is arriving. I also like to try to do some exercise and I definitely like long walks on the beach.

What work do you do for Bigpipe? Billing and Provisioning! Ordering the internets for our customers and then getting the money flowing.

What’s the best thing about Bigpipe? Aside from having sweet broadband, the best thing is the cool Bigpipe people I get to work with everyday – they’re a fairly cool team who can almost provide some competition in a game of Rocket League 😉
This is a lie. The Bigpipe team are much better than the care team at Rocket League and we will prove it, this lunchtime.

What’s your favourite thing that you use the Internet for? Reddit and watching TV and movies – legally, of course!

Favourite video game right now? Currently playing Assassins Creed: Black Flag. I’m only a couple of years behind the trends!

What is the dankest meme? The botched spanish fresco restoration always gets me

What’s the best thing that a customer ever said to you? Probably just “thank you”, it’s the little things that count.

Would you rather fight 100 bee-sized men, or 1 man-sized bee? 1 man-sized bee! They only have one stinger, so I’m sure I could deal with getting impaled by it only once, right?

Tell us a joke. Stolen but golden – “My girlfriend just dumped me for talking to much about video games. What a ridiculous thing to Fallout 4.”

Link us to your current favourite thing on the Internet 10 hour Gandalf Europop nod!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9RFb8xXZlk?feature=oembed&w=1080&h=608]

What is your spirit animal? That’s easy. A hedgehog.

This is what Enzo actually looks like.

Gidday readers. I’m Josh and I am the resident Marketing Wizzard here at Bigpipe Towers. You may remember me from such blog posts as the one where I used The Simpsons memes to explain why Bigpipe is awesome and/or get a job at Bigpipe. But today I want to talk about something serious: men’s health.

Here at Bigpipe, we like to celebrate serious things, like The Internet (It’s Serious Business!™) with things that are less serious (like cat memes). Movember fits into that nicely, much like a cat in a glass container.

Serious business.

There’s no better way to get serious about men’s health than Movember, and there’s no better way to do Movember than by starting by shaving off your beloved facial hair. This is what I looked like before Movember started:

File photo

As you can see, I favour hiding my face behind a well-cultivated hair-garden. It’s been this way for quite a while. Occasionally I’ll shave, because summer is hot, or something, then I’ll remember that I don’t actually like how my face looks when I don’t have hair on it and I’ll concentrate really hard and grow it all back in a couple of hours. I wish.

Part of the reason I have a beard is because it’s so much easier than shaving. Shaving is a pain in the face. The razor cuts you up like a, uh, razor, it leaves you with a rash and reeking of stuff you got given for Christmas by a relative who clearly hates you, and if you decide to take a break for just one day your face takes on the characteristics of barbed wire, sandpaper, and a cat’s tongue all at once, somehow. It’s not worth it. Having a beard is just better. It’s like a nice soft springy pillow attached to your face that you can also store food in if you need to. It’s also probably the only body part you can get away with gently stroking in public. There are many reasons to grow a beard and very few not to have one, but Movember is a good cause, so I decided to lop it all off, in exchange for your kind donations.

I documented the process, because this is 2015 and if I hadn’t done it someone else probably would have flown a drone down, filmed the whole thing, and uploaded it to a shaving fetish website.

It Begins.

I took the clippers and headed for the deck, which has a neat little space between it and the fence that we use to store leaves, dirt, cat shit, and facial hair. I plugged in a couple of extension cords, and started shaving.

My wife hates this one.

I quite like this one. I think this style makes me look somewhere between the bad guy from The Matrix and a 55 year old man who found Jesus in the water stains in his mother’s bath-tub.

Nobody with functioning eyes likes this one.

I call this one “Young Walter White but in an alternate universe where he got cancer at age 32.” I also look quite a lot like my Dad, who, from 1990 through 2001, had glasses, a moustache, and would tell anyone within several metres about Jesus at the first opportunity. We didn’t watch The Simpsons when I was kid and Dad could never figure out why people kept calling him Flanders.

oh god why

I call this one the “Reverse Hitler.” I worry for my future employment prospects putting this up, but I keep repeating to myself: “Good cause. Good cause.”

+4 to Streamlining, -20 to Charisma

This is the final result. I hate it and so do you. Immediately after shaving I had a horrible urge to scrape my beard out of the gap between the fence and deck (avoiding the cat shit if possible) and superglue it back on my face, where it belongs. Fortunately my wife held me back with strong threats of divorce. I can’t wait to get my poor beard back, so if you have enjoyed this mad ramble and would like to donate to the men’s health awareness cause, you can (should!) do so here. 

Also you should probably sign up to Bigpipe, we have good broadband internets.