We recently announced that we’re increasing our entry-level residential plans to 50Mbps, for an even better fibre experience (Refer to: Free upgrade for entry-level fibre customers). Read on for the next steps.

What's happening?

After testing in our production environment, we're now ready for the network release. Tomorrow night, we’ll increase the download speed of our existing residential Bitstream 2 offers from 30Mbps to 50Mbps. This applies to:

• Evolve 1
• Home Fibre 50

From Thursday 15 December 2016, end customers on these plans can enjoy 50Mbps downstream - provided you’ve adjusted your network profiles to match ours.

You can continue ordering these plans as per your usual process and we’ll bill you at the 30Mbps price.

What's the detail?

On Wednesday evening, we’ll adjust our downstream low traffic class QoS profiles for Evolve 1 and Home Fibre 50:

High traffic Class and upstream QoS profiles are unaffected.

The changes will be applied immediately without any service interruption, and utilises Accelerate’s ‘overclocking’ overhead. Your customers will be able to receive 50Mbps downstream, as soon as you update your network profiles to match ours.

We don’t expect to see significant changes in handover or network utilisation immediately. This is driven by average throughput, which is mainly based on customer behaviour. From past experience, we don’t expect immediate changes to your customers’ behaviour. They’ll continue to do what they do today, only quicker.

We do expect average throughput to increase with time, as your customers see higher speeds and change behaviour e.g. watch Netflix in HD instead of standard, or watch on two devices simultaneously. However, with average throughput increasing at 40-60% per annum, any acceleration is likely to be within this range.

Who do I contact?

If you'd like more information, please contact your service delivery manager.