You may have heard over the last two and half years that NBN, the ACCC and the retailers (including us) have been locked in discussions about NBN’s wholesale pricing. You can read more (gory) details here: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nbn-co-gets-green-light-for-new-pricing-service-standards-601301
Anyway the upshot of it is that there have been some changes to not only the prices that all the retailers (including us) have to pay but also the structure of those prices. For example NBN are finally doing away with the bandwidth (volume) pricing for speed tiers of 100Mbps and above.
How does this affect you? Well the good news is that if you want to carry on paying what you are paying now (subject to any discounts expiring) on the speed tier you are on now you can do so. We are “grandfathering” whatever plan and discounts you are on now (subject to the usual rules around grandfathering, namely that you can’t pause / disconnect for longer the 2 months and it only applies to your current address). At some point we may revisit this and retire the old plans, but that is not going to happen until next year at least.
However we have introduced some new pricing to match the pricing from NBN, these will be the prices we offer to new customers. However, because we don’t believe in the “Loyalty Tax” (where only new customers get the good deals), as we always have done previously you are free to check out the new prices and if they suit you better, you can elect to move to them – choose Modify in the portal and select “Show latest options / pricing”. If you want to stay where you are, then just hit “Cancel”.
Here are the speed tiers and their pricing:-
| Speed | Nominal speed | Daily Price | Notes |
| FW Plus | 75/10 | $3.10/day | Only available on Fixed Wireless |
| Homefast | 100/20 | $3.10/day | |
| 100/40 | 100/40 | $3.50/day | |
| SuperFast | 250/25 | $3.90/day | Only available on HFC/FTTP |
| NQFast | 400/50 | $4.10/day | Only available on HFC/FTTP |
| Ultrafast | 1000/50 | $4.20/day | Only available on HFC/FTTP |
| 250/100 | 250/100 | $5.30/day | Only available on FTTP |
| 500/200 | 500/200 | $7.50/day | Only available on FTTP |
| 1000/400 | 1000/400 | $10.00/day | Only available on FTTP |
| Standby | 0/0 | $0.50/day |
For a full “Customer Information Summary” note that this is for FTTP – depending on your technology you may not be able to get all these speeds: https://residential.launtel.net.au/cis/CIS-FTTP-47.pdf
Key highlights of the above:-
- Pricing takes effect for NEW customers from Nov 1st, 2023.
- Existing customers can elect to either stay where they are (on their current pricing) OR move to the pricing above (select Modify and “show latest options/pricing”). Some people (particularly those whose have lower speeds and are still on the FillerUp discount) may do better to stay where they are – we will “grandfather” you! However we aren’t going to promise that the grandfathering will last forever! But there will be plenty of notice on any changes around this.
- We are no longer going to be selling the speed tiers below 100Mbps (except FWPlus) to NEW customers. We have cut our margins on the Homefast to make it more attractive to those people who are stuck on poor quality connections, but we understand this isn’t going to be a good deal for some. The charge of the next speed down, 50/20, from NBN is so close to the price of the Homefast (100/20), that it seemed pointless to continue to offer it.
- The daily standby charge is much reduced and is now a viable alternative to pausing. It keeps your connection alive and avoids some of the pitfalls that can occur when pausing and unpausing a connection. We are also hoping to offer a really slow speed, like 1Mbs, for a reasonable price for those that want to keep their home automation going while they are away.
- We have reduced the pricing on the 250/100, 500/200 & 1000/40 even though there has been no change from NBN, however they have (very recently) announced that they expect to be drastically reducing the charges on these high upload speed tiers in July 2024. We are hoping that this will become financially viable in the future for people who have high upload requirements.
- We are currently embarking on a whole new network build in the next few months. This will include redundant backhaul to all the POI and we expect that every metro POI with have at least 3.5Gb of capacity (currently most have only 1.5Gb) and at least 1.5Gb (currently most only have 1Gb) for all the non-metro POI. So yes we are a little more expensive than some providers, but we are aiming for a much higher quality of internet. This does of course cost money!
Damian Ivereigh
Launtel CTO
2nd Nov 2023
