Electronics
Internet providers
Introduction
Our annual survey reveals which Internet Service Providers are good ... bad ... or just plain ugly.
If you’re looking at changing ISPs, the experience of customers is an invaluable guide. More than 11,000 of our members rated their ISP for overall performance, customer service, connection problems and more.
Find out which ISPs in our survey rated best in 2011.
About our survey
11,038 online members completed our survey in October 2011.
Our survey’s rating categories are overall performance, customer service and reliability.
We asked our members how they rated their ISP overall over the last 12 months. The performance rating here is the percentage who rated their ISP’s performance as “good” or “very good”.
We also asked how satisfied they were with customer service in terms of in-home setup, phone help (billing), phone help (technical) and online help. The satisfaction rating is based on the percentage of people who’d used the service and were “fairly satisfied” or “very satisfied”.
Finally we asked about the ISP’s reliability for connection and speed. The rating for reliability is based on the percentage of broadband users who had not experienced disconnections, dropouts, or slower-than-expected speeds.
See the Survey results for details of how individual ISPs performed.
Changing ISPs
Fewer than a thousand – 9 percent of those who took part in our survey – had changed their ISP during the last 12 months.
The most common reason for changing was finding a cheaper plan; but a quarter said they’d switched because of poor service from their old ISP. 34 percent had problems making the change – and for nearly half of them, the problems occurred in setting up with their new provider.
Settling disputes
If you have an issue with your ISP and haven’t been able to resolve it with the company, you can take it to the Telecommunication Dispute Resolution service (TDR).
The TDR can’t consider complaints about companies that are not part of the scheme (but big players like Telecom, TelstraClear and Vodafone are members). It also doesn’t deal with issues about mobile coverage.
Find the best ISP for you
Find the best ISP and broadband plan for your needs by checking our free telecommunications comparison website.
The price of data
Cost was an issue we didn't look at. For comparing ISPs on price we recommend using our free TelMe.org.nz website, and then comparing those prices with the ISP’s performance results in this survey.
According to the Commerce Commission’s international monitoring reports, Kiwis pay more for internet than other developed nations. And we aren’t getting faster megabits per second (Mbps) speeds for our money either. Our average speeds are similar to countries like Singapore and Australia (~3Mbps), but we lag behind the US and Canada (5Mbps) and well below Japan and Hong Kong (8-9Mbps) at the head of the pack.
How fast is fast?
Internet speeds are measured in data amounts per second, usually Mbps.
Generally you'll find that internet plans state you'll get the "maximum possible" download speeds. For most customers this is around 3-7Mbps. Upload speeds are often capped and are much slower. This can be an issue if you’re sending a lot of information over the internet – like photos, video or gaming.
Where you are has a big effect on the speeds you can get. Rural areas still find it hard to get good speeds.
Zero-rating
Quite a few ISPs now offer “zero-rated websites” — these are sites (such as YouTube, Twitter or on-demand TV) that you can visit without it counting against your data cap. This is a bonus to many plans and can be useful for those who regularly use such sites.