Good news everyone!

The Bigpipe Code-Elves have been busy, slaving away in their dank sub-basement coming up with fantastically useful improvements for all you wonderful Bigpipe customers. Spare a thought for them; dab their sweating brows with a metaphorical moist towelette, as we reveal…

Moving house & changing plans made easy!

People love to move house and/or change their Bigpipe plan. We know this because our customers tell us when they do. In the past, it’s not been the easiest thing in the world, and that’s no good. When you’re moving house, the last thing you need is the hassle of figuring out your broadband connection.

So we’ve made it nice and easy and super-quick for you. Here’s how to do it!

If you log into your Bigpipe account dashboard, you’ll now see this spiffy-looking widget (without all the red bits, obvs, that’s us)

Aw yeah, look at that! All you gotta do, if you want to change address (or change your Bigpipe plan at your current address) is click one of those handy green buttons.

Changing plan

Changing plan is as easy as clicking “CHANGE PLAN” and selecting from the available plans at your address. We recommend giving this a go, right now, to see what plans are available at your place – we find a lot of people have a fibre upgrade available, and don’t even know it! Have a crack, because changing Bigpipe plans is free, and you might be able to get a vastly better fibre connection for the same price as our Fast plan – only $79 a month.

Changing address

Just fill out the address where you’ll be moving to (you’ll have to pick an address from the list of options that appears when you start typing), and whether you’ve already shifted. Or you can add a preferred connection date.

Now you’ll get to select the Bigpipe plan for your new address. Your current plan will be highlighted. Any Bigpipe plans not available at your new address will be greyed out. In this example, all our plans are available at the new address! Sweet!

Let’s select the fastest plan we’ve got, Bigpipe’s Elite.

It’ll ask you to confirm the details you’ve entered (make sure they’re all correct!)

Once you’ve clicked the green CONFIRM button, you’ll see the below screen:

And if you check back at the Bigpipe dashboard, you’ll see that your move of address is being processed!

And that’s it! Next time you’re moving house, or if you want to try a different Bigpipe plan, do it the easy way – just log in and choose your new plan or move.

By The Bigpipe People                                                           @BigpipeNZ

At Bigpipe, we do everything we can to make your broadband experience as good as it can be, but we thought it would be a good idea to share some tips on the things you can do in your own home to help you improve your own broadband experience.

Choosing the fastest possible broadband plan in your area so you can get the most out of what is available to you. with Bigpipe, our 100Mbps UFB plan is only $79, that’s the same price as our most popular ADSL2 plan.To check what broadband technology is available in your area, use the address checker on our site (link to homepage) to see what plans are available at your address. If you can get UFB at your place, we highly recommend going for that.

Bigpipe’s UFB plans, available in Auckland and Wellington.

Pick a decent router, this small piece of equipment is essential in contributing to your home’s broadband experience, especially if you have lot of devices accessing the net at the same time. You wouldn’t buy a new 64” LED TV and place it onto an old, wonky and unsuitable TV stand, so why have broadband and use a really cheap router? Ensuring that you have a decent router with updated firmware will optimise your Bigpipe broadband experience. The expected lifespan of a cheap router is 1-3 years whereas if you invest a little more, you can expect your router to last you 5+ years. Bigpipe recommends the Netcomm NF8AC as this router is suitable for all broadband plans including UFB all the way up to 1Gb speeds, so you’re really investing yourself in the broadband of the future.

The Netcomm NF8AC router

If you have ADSL or VDSL, ensure that your home wiring is in order for optimum broadband connectivity in your home. Older homes especially often have wiring not optimised for delivering good broadband. Over time, wiring in your home can corrode or get damaged, this corrosion seriously inhibits the maximum speeds that you can obtain from your connection. If you notice that your internet sometimes slows down and can cut off from time to time, we recommend you get a technician to have a look at your internal wiring and fit a ‘master filter’ to bypass any bad wiring. As your ISP, Bigpipe can organise this for you, although there is a cost of around $200.

A master filter

Don’t allow your neighbours to piggyback off your network. This is important, if you don’t have a secured password on your home network you open yourself up to people leeching your connection, or, worse, using it for illegal purposes for which you might get the blame! Most routers come with the wifi connection already secured with a default password, but if your doesn’t just follow the manual to make sure you turn it on and set a secure password.

Members of the public leeching off of Apple’s free Wi-Fi outside one of their stores.

Placement of your router around your home is very important. If you have your router placed in an unsuitable location in your home, you’re instantly limiting your broadband speed capabilities. It is also best to keep your router away from any electrical devices in your home that could interfere with the Wi-Fi frequencies that your router omits. When placing your router somewhere in your home, think about the most central place, or the place closest to where you want to be using the internet the most. The fewer walls/floors between your device and the router-the better! Here’s an example of how poor router placement in the corner of the house inhibits wifi signal strength.

Diagram showing the Wi-Fi signal around the home and how the infrastructure of your home inhibits the signals strength from room to room.

Also, if you find your Wi-Fi speeds are much lower than expected, it could be your neighbours Wi-Fi interfering. Try logging into your router and changing the Wi-Fi channel to see if that improves things. Try channels 1, 6 or 11 for the best chance of avoiding interference.

Choose an ISP that doesn’t throttle your speeds. Some ISP’s throttling their customers speeds to keep their costs down. This occurs during peak usage times on their networks (usually between 4pm and 10pm). Bigpipe believe in providing enough bandwidth for all our customers to use, all the time, so we don’t throttle our customers speeds and we’ve got the evidence to prove it. We’re the top performing download ISP in New Zealand during peak times. See our performance as tested in the TrueNet report.

Manage your auto-updates and see when your devices are scheduled to update their own software. You don’t want to get home in the evenings ready to stream your favourite series online and to then realise that your laptop needs to update a million programs at once. Also, ensuring that other devices around your home aren’t running programs in the background will help you to ensure that only the devices you’re using are what is connected to your network.

Spread your traffic. If you have housemates who do a lot of downloading, try and get them to do it overnight or when other people aren’t trying to use the internet. Sharing is caring.

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Follow us on Twitter @BigpipeNZ

By Simon Moutter 

Chorus’ latest half-year financial report shows it spent just $28 million on copper network capital expenditure, less than a tenth of the $297 million spent on fibre capex.

The Commerce Commission will shortly make a decision that will have a big impact on how much we all pay to use the internet or landline.

It will be setting charges that internet service providers (such as Spark, Vodafone and Slingshot) are required to pay the monopoly access provider (Chorus) for internet and landline connections over the copper network.

The stakes are high: a change of just $1 per month per line in charges translates into $100 million of value over the five-year regulatory period, and the commission is proposing to increase the key wholesale access charge for a copper line by $5 a month.

That’s a transfer of half a billion dollars from internet and landline customers to Chorus.

If you’re among the 90 per cent  of New Zealanders who rely on the old copper network for their internet or landline access, then around half what you pay in your monthly bill to your service provider already ends up with Chorus.  

So, the Commerce Commission has a major influence on the price you pay.

As happens too often in complicated regulatory processes, the voice of the consumer has not been heard much in this process.

That’s why Spark New Zealand launched our BeCounted campaign.  We wanted to explain to New Zealanders what makes up the cost of accessing the internet and to give them an easy way of sending a submission.

To date, more than 50,000 people have visited the website and sent in submissions. This has greatly exceeded our most optimistic expectations and shows how important better value access to the internet is to New Zealanders.

Until late last year, the commission said it would set the Chorus charges about $10 a month lower than previously.

This would have been a great outcome for consumers, and it prompted a price war among service providers in anticipation of the new charges taking effect.

The result was cheaper, faster plans, heaps more data (including new unlimited data plans), great discounts on associated services and investment in  new services such as Lightbox.

However, in December last year the commission surprised everyone by backtracking on its previous position and proposing charges go back up by about $5 a month – and refusing to rule out backdating the new charges when they finally come into effect later this year.

What’s more, it said this $5 increase would also apply to basic landline connections that did not have internet access. In response, Spark and most other service providers recently had to increase their prices by a few dollars to pass this on.

Our analysis shows the commission’s proposed wholesale charges are almost 80 per cent higher than the median of comparable countries and 60 per cent higher than the next highest country (Germany).

That works out at up to $180 more a year for every internet and landline customer.

On the flip side, it’s important to remember that as a country we are already paying Chorus to replace its copper network with a fibre network, through the Government’s UFB and rural broadband initiatives.

These subsidies should actually mean that Chorus needs less funding to run its legacy copper network than its peers in comparable countries, which are operating and replacing their networks without taxpayer subsidies.

By way of illustration, Chorus’ latest half-year financial report shows it spent just $28 million on copper network capital expenditure, less than a tenth of the $297 million spent on fibre capex.

We strongly believe the onus should be on the commission to explain why, in terms that ordinary consumers can understand, New Zealanders should pay more.  Unfortunately, it has  so far avoided doing so.

We accept this is a complex process, but it boils down to whether the Commerce Commission is prepared to act in the best interests of consumers and ensure Chorus monopoly charges are not way out of line with the rest of the world.

Simon Moutter is the managing director of Spark New Zealand.

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Why are kiwis so attached to their landlines when there are options for having naked broadband, a term used to refer to having broadband that does not need a landline?

Globally the shift towards getting ‘naked’ is growing in momentum. More and more, people are willing to shed their landline and reap the benefits and freedom of ‘naked’ broadband.

Here in New Zealand around 15 percent of households have already ditched the traditional landline and have moved onto ‘naked’ broadband. Although that number is climbing (up from just eight percent in 2006) — when this is compared to countries such as the USA where 40 percent of households don’t have a landline — the number of Kiwis still shelling out their hard earned dollars to use an old fashioned home phone system is still staggeringly high.

Mobile phones have effectively replaced and surpassed landlines both in convenience and functionality. Using a mobile makes sense. It’s always with you, you can make or receive a call from virtually anywhere in the country, you get a handy contacts list built into the phone, and extra features like caller ID and call waiting are usually free.

Why the attachment?

So why are so many Kiwis still clinging to their landlines? Do they really love receiving cold calls from telemarketers, market research agencies, and scammers? Not likely.

As with the adoption of many technologies, it comes down to perception lagging behind reality. A lot of people assume that you must buy a landline with your broadband package. They also assume that the cost of mobile calling is more expensive than landline calling – so they keep their landline because that’s what they’ve always done.

Both of those assumptions used to be true, not anymore.

Today, most ISPs have a ‘naked’ broadband option. ‘Naked’ simply means broadband that doesn’t require a landline. Depending on usage, you could save anything from $10 to $50 per month on your plan, simply by ditching a landline you probably rarely use.

Why ISPs still sell you landline

Many ISPs don’t promote this, they’d rather sell you the landline as well as the broadband.

As for the cost of making calls, that too has changed. The mobile market has become increasingly competitive in the last few years, and especially so in the last few months.  Back in 2009, $50 would get you around 100 minutes of mobile calling.  Right now, you can get unlimited calls for less than $50 per month with Skinny mobile (and that includes unlimited SMS and a hefty 4G of data to boot).  Spark and 2Degrees offer similar plans.

Or if, like me, you don’t really do a lot of talking, preferring free services like Facebook, WhatsApp or email to keep in touch, then you can get smaller amounts like 100 minutes for less than $10.  Simply by making small adjustments to your plans, and embracing technology such as Skype for international calls, a saving of $30 or more per month is very likely.

The beauty of choice

The changes in the telco landscape that give Kiwis the choice to make super cheap mobile calls are relatively new, which explains why we are lagging behind the US in terms of ‘naked’ broadband uptake.  However, with these cost effective and competitive plans now well and truly in place, I believe we are on the tipping point of seeing a huge increase in the number of Kiwis who want to get ‘naked’.

We saw this trend coming. Every other ISP has some kind of home phone calling option they try and sell you. Bigpipe doesn’t.  We only do ‘naked’.

We focus only on the broadband, and nothing else.  By selling only ‘naked’, we avoid a lot of the complexity that comes with selling voice services. Our customer’s bills are the same every month – simplicity underpins our ‘naked’ offering.

Some of the benefits of getting naked broadband include no landline required and flexibility, with various levels of investment aligned to varying upload download speeds.

The results speak for themselves.  As reported in the latest Truenet report Bigpipe performs strongly against all the big players in the market.

Ultra-Fast ‘naked’ broadband is the next generation of broadband that Kiwis now have access to. So why not give it a go? Get ‘naked’, who knows, you may be surprised by how much you enjoy it.

Oliver Smith is the head of Bigpipe Broadband, a sub-brand of Spark, which offers naked unlimited broadband plans.

Oliver Smith