Because we’re massive geeks, my partner and I have decided to make the jump to Ultra Fast Broadband. We’re lucky enough to live in an area that has UFB connected.
Chorus tells us that UFB will make a world-class network for New Zealand and unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past year you would have heard about UFB from the government and in the media. I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk about my experience changing to UFB and let you know what it is.
For me one of the most difficult things about my current internet connection is the mass of things that can cause the speed to reduce. (Don’t get me wrong, my current one is good, but it could be better.) The unknown dodgy wiring in your house, something at a cabinet on the street, someone has misconfigured your line, your modem is set up wrong, the distance from your house to the cabinet. Any one of these could result in slower speeds and it can get very complicated.
This highlights one of the hardest things about UFB: the perception of complexity. Everyone has an opinion on it and people very quickly get very technical to explain their opinion. To clarify, UFB is the fibre network, while ADSL/VDSL and phone lines today run on the copper network. Like all technology, UFB is the next step in technology from ADSL & VDSL. The fibre is what the data that makes up the internet travels along.
Given the internet age, we have so many devices in our households that all expect connectivity. When things get slow we know about it and usually start to rant about it. I decided to do a speedtest on my ADSL connection now to compare it to my new fibre connection once it’s installed. The image below is my current connection speed.
Photo: Unknown
Before we contacted anyone, we needed to do our own preparation. We have a monitored house alarm that connects to a monitoring company through our phone line. So we called the company to change the alarm to run over the internet. We had to do this because we’ve chosen an ISP who only uses fibre services. (Some ISPs continue to use copper services.)
The security company visited one afternoon and took approximately an hour to switch out a part and configure the alarm. The most complicated part was our door bell. It’s daisy chained off our alarm electrical work, so it took a while to make sure it still worked.
We were then prepared to get in touch with our new ISP. We put a request in to get UFB installed, switching our internet and phone services to them. We paid roughly $395 for a new modem which can provide our connection and run our phone over UFB.
The new ISP got in touch to say they received our request and Chorus would be round eventually. Chorus then got in touch shortly after. Given this all happened a week before Christmas, I was quite surprised at the timeframe. I thought we wouldn’t be on the list until at least mid-January. However, they told us we were scheduled in for the 30th of December.
So we’re all booked in and ready to go - stay tuned for the other posts on the rest of our UFB journey.
