Telecom announces fibre plan with no landline hook

The plans are available across both 30Mbps and 100Mbps fibre speeds, and prices start from $55.

Telecom has announced a Naked Ultra Fibre plan, which will allow users to tap into fibre speeds without paying for a home phone package.

The plans are available across both 30Mbps and 100Mbps fibre speeds, and prices start from $55. Customers can sign up to the standalone product, or can choose to combine the Ultra Fibre Naked with a Telecom Ultra Mobile $39 or above plan, which will give them an additional $20 discount.

GM for home, mobile and business at Telecom Jason Paris said that a growing proportion of New Zealanders rarely if ever used their landlines, instead relying on their mobiles and applications like Skype to keep in touch with friends and family.

“The popularity of our naked broadband product has been growing steadily amongst customers since we launched it late last year – so offering a superfast version is the logical next step.

“The landline continues to be popular of course, but a growing group of our customers tell us that the only calls they receive on their home phone are from people who are either trying to sell them something or asking about their political views. These customers are quite happy to stop chatting to telemarketers and political pollsters if it means they can save a few dollars each month.”

Paris said the business had seen a growing momentum in fibre sales over the past few month.

“Ultra Fibre customers tell us that once they’ve experienced life online with fibre, they could never go back to their old broadband plan – it is that much better. This is particularly the case when it comes to data hungry applications like gaming or video.”

Paris said that Ultra Fibre Naked plans would be available to Telecom customers anywhere that fibre is available.

Telecom will also be contacting a group of email customers who will be affected by a change to its Xtra email service taking place at the end of September this year.

Telecom spokeswoman Gemma Croombs said that on 30 September Telecom will be retiring its now outdated SMTP email server. This server uses old technology, and is not able to be updated with the range of enhancements Telecom is rolling out to ensure the security of its email service.

“Customers whose email travels through the SMTP server will need to manually change their outgoing mail settings before it is retired. For most people, we expect this will be a simple setting change, and should take less than 5 minutes. After they’ve made the change, their email will still work the same – it will just go through a more up-to-date server,” said Croombs.

This week Telecom will begin making direct contact with those customers who are still using the old SMTP settings, to help them through making the change.

“Every single customer who is affected by this change will receive either an email or a phone call from us. If they don’t hear from us, then they are not affected, and they don’t need to do anything,” Croombs said.

Information on how to make the change can be found here.

Croombs said that less than 15 per cent of the total email base of customers will be affected by the change.