National broadband provider iiNet this morning confirmed its final pricing plans for its National Broadband fibre offerings in the early stage rollout sites in Tasmania, noting also that it had signed up its first customers of the service.

The plans do not differ markedly from the ISP’s expected NBN pricing announced some time ago, and are similar to its pricing in other early stage fibre areas not associated with the NBN — such as Telstra’s rollout in Point Cook, Victoria.

However, although in a statement this morning, iiNet chief executive Michael Malone claimed line honours for the first customers to have signed up for NBN plans, rival Primus is known to have already signed up customers when it launched its own plans several weeks ago.

Malone said the first iiNet customers would be connected “as soon as Tasmania NBN Co was ready to flick the switch”. In the weeks ahead, iiNet would commence a new marketing campaign that would see residents in the early stage rollout areas of Midway Point, Smithton and Scottsdale would receive a “special orange envelope” in their mailbox promoting iiNet’s services.

“Yep, we think it’s kind of cute that we are using ‘snail mail’ to encourage Australians to connect to the fastest internet service the country has ever seen,” he said.

IiNet will offer customers who sign up before 30 September a deal with zero setup costs if they sign up to a 24 month plan – avoiding in-home wiring required to get the NBN connected, that would normally cost around $180, according to iinet.

The offer will also see customers provided with iiNet’s BoB wireless modem and phone unit, which is normally valued at $269, and any account setup fees waived.

“NBN fibre customers will also have the option to sign up to iiNet’s iiTalkpack product if they choose; iiTalkpack costs $9.95 a month, including all local and national calls, with very competitive rates on mobile, international and 13 and 1300 numbers,” said iiNet’s statement. Custmoers will also be able to signup to iiNet’s FetchTV IPTV offering, which has not yet been released publicly.

However, it remains unclear whether iiNet’s internet telephony service will be provided through its BoB device – with the included analogue telephone adapter – or whether it will use the analogue telephone plug which the NBN will see installed in people’s homes.

Image credit: Delimiter screenshot of iiNet press release

Related posts:

1. iiNet massively undercuts Internode’s NBN plans
2. iiNet launches terabyte NBN plans
3. iiNet confirms TransACT acquisition
4. iiNet announces NBN satellite plans
5. iiNet launches terabyte broadband plans

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1. Ben Short
   Posted 01/06/2010 at 10:01 am | Permalink | Reply

   So Why would I want Fibre 1, when I could get Fibre 2 for the same price? :)

   • A Smith
     Posted 14/03/2011 at 9:30 am | Permalink | Reply

     Because not every home will have access to Fibre 2

2. Wolf Cocklin
   Posted 01/06/2010 at 10:04 am | Permalink | Reply

   why the slow upload speeds… I thought it was going to be 50mpbs up for 100 down?

   • Ben Short
     Posted 01/06/2010 at 10:09 am | Permalink | Reply

     As a residential user, do you really need 50mbps up? really?? :)

     having greater upload speeds will encourage home users to host content – which isn’t really what ISPs want you to be doing with home accounts – they want you to buy a business account for that :)

     • David Banes
       Posted 01/06/2010 at 10:18 am | Permalink | Reply

       But we live in an age when users are generating significant amounts of content and governments are encouraging us to tele-commute.

       As a small business owner I’d love to stay at home rather than head into the office just because I have a lot of data to upload.

       • Ben Short
         Posted 01/06/2010 at 10:21 am | Permalink | Reply

         That’s a fair point and I agree whole heartedly. It was with much excitement that I got ADSL2+ the other week, not because of download speeds but because of the increased upload capacity. Makes using a VPN to work much nicer :)

         However is that something that should be down on a residential service, or SOHO/Business service?

         • David Banes
           Posted 01/06/2010 at 10:30 am | Permalink | Reply

           The reality is that the difference between consumer, SOHO and business services are the configuration and the marketing, not the technology.

           We used to have an Ozemail 512/512 connection at home which was great. I’d happily pay more for a symmetric service at home but not at the prices most ISP’s are quoting us.

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 01/06/2010 at 10:39 am | Permalink | Reply

     No, NBN Co has never been planning 50Mbps up, although I’m sure business-type symmetrical plans will emerge shortly. NBN Co has always, to my understanding, only planned to offer three wholesale speeds and services — the ones that iiNet has revealed here.

3. Wolf Cocklin
   Posted 01/06/2010 at 10:24 am | Permalink | Reply

   10 years ago dial up speed was enough for everyone to upload at.

   Why would someone want 50mbits.. easy… uploading full HD video content in realtime, doing remote e-health imaging e.t.c

   The real use of the upload speed has yet to really be invented, but limiting the speeds limits the innovation that can occur.

   • David Banes
     Posted 01/06/2010 at 10:51 am | Permalink | Reply

     Well said, that’s what we’ve been saying at the IIA for years…

     • David Banes
       Posted 01/06/2010 at 10:52 am | Permalink | Reply

       Sorry I need to clarify that – I’m an EX Director of the IIA .. got a bit carried away there :)

4. Trevor Rhodes
   Posted 01/06/2010 at 12:34 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Hmmm, considering whtat I have now, I would be paying more for less download at a faster speed. What use then is the extra speed except to take the money out of my pocket faster?

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 01/06/2010 at 2:34 pm | Permalink | Reply

     Latency is also a factor — meaning we will all have significantly better response time — important for gaming etc :) Latency on fibre kills latency on copper dead!

     • Jenna Pitcher
       Posted 01/06/2010 at 7:08 pm | Permalink | Reply

       Which make Aussie gamers very happy.

5. Nathan Brister
   Posted 06/05/2011 at 9:28 am | Permalink | Reply

   Again so many simple minded people! The whole point of NBN is to have faster speeds than we do today. 25Mbps? yes there will be an increase in speeds if your on 12 or 16 or even 20 Mbps connection but only very little would be notice. Yes I’m well aware that there would be many people on a 1.5Mpbs and alot of people under 10Mbps but the simple fact is, 36 Billion dollars are being spent on this broadband and we only getting a small portion out of it? GIVE ME A BREAK!

   Those of you commenting about upload speeds and why should it be high. Simple fact is alot of people are looking at cloud services, etc and depending on the sizes of the files being uploaded, why do we need to wait a hell of a long time just to upload a 30 or 100 or 300 mb file? Today uploading music to cloud services like amazon and apple takes forever.

   WAKE UP!!!!

   We need 1Gbps down 100 Mbps up. Or at least 100 Mbps UP/DOWN…… SIMPLE AS THAT!

   Trust me there are thousands of people that are frustrated with speeds today and not everyone is using these speeds to download illegal content, there are many other services that required faster internet just to get to its full potential.