We have been running wireless over a month now since we closed the Fusion account at World Exchange (WxC). We had it 5 or 6 years but it was giving problems every month or two requiring Chorus to fix their system at the Whitianga end, the result of which was no phone or internet for a day. Vodafone recently bought WxC which seems to have made them inflexible. We had a 5GB broadband account with about $1 per extra GB and we were using about 20 GB per month. WxC's only upgrade was unlimited ADSL data, we are too far from the cabinet for VDSL and there are no fibre plans in Whitianga.
So, we bought Skinny broadband which just plugs in and delivers broadband from Spark's 4G cell system. It pulls in about 10-15 M per sec down and 10 upload which works just fine. It's a Huawei B315S-608 and it comes with a Skinny SIM, 100G per month for $52. That was the easy bit. It's wireless as well as Ethernet.
For the wireless phone, we needed a cellular gateway with the landline ported to it.
I bought a 2 Degrees prepay SIM and set up $8 a month for 60 minutes carryover talk time. On TradeMe I bought an obsolete Vodafone Home Wireless Phone unit for $10 and it worked OK for about a month but about 20% of callers complained about echo, which was the reason VF withdrew that model a few years ago. It runs on the old 2G GSM network which is probably going to be shutdown in 2017.
I used www.tnz.co.nz to port our landline to the 2 Degrees SIM. That cost $40 setup, then $10 per month plus incoming calls about 25c/min.
Looking at improving the echo, I bought a Ufone U118 from eBay which is a bluetooth to landline/cellular gateway. It didn't work, because the Americans had set it up to use '0' to select the landline and of course all our NZ calls start with '0'. There was no manufacturer support.
Then I bought an Xlink BT Bluetooth Gateway, and that works really well, as clear as the old landline. I use a Nokia E63 as the cellphone and can now also send texts. The E63 has the charger permanently plugged in. I bought the Xlink from http://onwireless.com.au/ which had the advantage of getting a power pack with an NZ/AU plug instead of US. Don't buy the BTTN model, it has a landline socket and will not be so simple as the BT (cellular only).
Monthly costs? $8 for 2 Degrees including 60min carryover outgoing calls. $10 for TNZ plus incoming calls (say $25). Broadband $52 flat rate for way more GB than we use. Total under $100. We are trying to encourage callers to use the 2D mobile number if they are calling from a cellphone, so no incoming call charges for us.
We could dispense with TNZ and 'bring our landline number' to 2 Degrees, but the gotcha is: you can only do that in monthly accounts ($30 per month) plus $20 per month for the landline.
# posted by Doug @ 11:42 AM
So, we bought Skinny broadband which just plugs in and delivers broadband from Spark's 4G cell system. It pulls in about 10-15 M per sec down and 10 upload which works just fine. It's a Huawei
