Basic UFB plans compared

Telecom is the first of New Zealand's two largest telcommunications companies to offer an Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) service for home users. It enters what looks deceptively like a crowded market with nine other companies already selling residential fibre services.

The table below shows the cheapest plan from each UFB service provider. All are for 30Mbps downloads and 10Mbps upload speeds – faster services are more expensive.

As you can see, the price for Telecom NZ’s service sits at the high-end of the range, however it includes a copper line subscription for voice calls and the 50GB of included data is towards the generous end of the range.

Unless you have restricted needs, you are unlikely to find these basic plans to be much use. Fibre lends itself to video and you’ll find yourself quickly chewing through tens of gigabytes. Realistically you’ll need to buy a service with more than 100GB to get value from fast broadband.

Table note: Lightwire and Xnet have a $200 installation fee which includes a router.