Goodbye Telecom

Next week I’ll be porting my Telecom phone number to a VoIP provider (2talk) and then getting naked DSL provisioned on my line.  This setup should leave me with full speed broadband, the benefits of a VoIP line (I’ll blog about that later) and all the features that 2talk provide for my voice line for only $85 per month.

Considering my broadband/phone bill currently sits at about $120 per month this will be a nice saving, plus an excuse to play with some technology   I’ll be using Snap for the naked DSL, only because Orcon (my current provider) haven’t unbundled in Dunedin yet and it looks like it’ll be quite a while.

If you don’t mind a bit of downtime on your phone line or broadband service, the steps are:

1. Port your phone number to 2talk.
2. Get naked DSL provisioned on your home line.
3. Configure your system so that your phone rings at home by connecting to 2talk’s servers

You’ll need some hardware, and some charges (termination charges with your current broadband provider for example) may apply.

Orcon bumps their prices up

Winking away in my inbox today was an email from Orcon – this is generally a good sign as they like to announce new plans, good deals etc. This announcement in particular was not welcome:

Putting our prices up is something we try really hard to avoid. But sometimes it’s beyond our control.

So unfortunately we’ve been forced to pass on an increase for the monthly rental of your Orcon homeline. This will mean your Orcon Homeline Plus (includes W&M Insurance) plan price will increase by $3.00 per month.

We’re also having to increase our national landline calling rate from 15c to 19c per minute. If you have an unlimited number of national calls as part of your plan don’t worry, that’s not changing – this rate will only be applied if a call exceeds an hour, effective from the 23rd of August.

The discount you get for having your tolls with us will remain, but will now be $5 instead of $10. This will effectively mean that your broadband plan is $5 more expensive per month.

These changes are going to take effect from the 23rd of August.

There is some good news though. We’ve managed to keep the capped calling rate exactly the same. So if you don’t have unlimited national calling you’ll still pay no more than $2.95 for calls of up to an hour in duration to NZ landlines.

That’s a monthly increase of $8 which is pretty significant. For them to say that there’s good news in that they’re not raising some prices is pretty sad. I would have thought that with technology being what it is, prices would be coming down, not going up.

The bad news for Orcon is that they’ll likely be losing a customer. Watch this space for my findings on researching other NZ providers.