Telecom Reviews

Bad customer service.
Broadband drops out every night between 7 and 10pm at least once.
Expensive plans.

I am on this site looking for a provider that kiwis are happy with.

With such expensive plans, you should at the very least, be able to have an NZ based customer call centre. After 15 years with the same number and paying $86 monthly for phone & 5GB broadband I am leaving.
Last month I received a letter inviting me to sign in to a 12 month contract term with them. I did not respond to due to having ultrafast broadband cabling in my area and I am waiting to see what opportunities may lie ahead.
This month, for the first time, I have exceeded my 5GB plan and they have immediately dropped me to dial up speed. I have not had any changes in my internet habits in the month.
When I called customer service and took the option to have a call back, I was on hold for a further twenty minutes before speaking with someone from the call centre. If you don't like Crowded House music, then 'on hold' at Telecom is not going to send you to a happy place. I am really surprised that Crowded House would want there musical reputation tarnished like this.
That's right 15 years where I have paid every account on time and never (in three years) exceeded my broadband plan. This is how you treat customers? The deal they offered in there letter was 30GB for $75.

That they have competition...

I cant stand the infuriating automated answering system for the Suppose oops sorry support dept. Poor service... poor connection.... fluxuating pathetic broadband speeds... lack of service in our Deep South... getting treated with ignorance from Telecon "CON"

Telecon are pathetic ignorant idiots

on the 120gb plan but that will never happen as the connection is so unreliable.... the speed is so slow they know we will never use a 10th of it..... so they suck people in with big numbers knowing they can never deliver just to get you paying the dosh!!!

Ok speed nothing wrong with that.

Bad customer service.

I got ripped off $900 because of bad customer service in the shop and on the phone.

The speed and overall use of the internet stick I got was good, but when I asked the shop guy "will I be charged more for going over my gigs?" he said "oh not much. an extra 20 bucks or so". I was like sweet. Used my gigs got first bill $320 bucks its ment to be $70.
I then rang up to ask why it was so much. The guy on the phone said "you went over by 2 gigs and we charge per 'mb' not per gigs". I was furious. I told him what the guy said in the shop and that he NEVER said that. I never would of got it otherwise. He then told his boss and they apologized and made a deal with me. I pretty much got 8 free gigs and 150 free texts and they wiped my bill.
So i never went over again. But then my laptop broke while moving and I rang up to put my contract on hold till I get a new one. The woman said yes thats ok we will put your PAYMENTS on hold for you. I asked clearly "so I WONT BE PAYING 70 A MONTH because I wont be using my stick?". SHE SAID "YOU DONT HAVE TO PAY TILL YOU START USING IT AGAIN". I was like sweet.
3 months went by I got NO letters NO bills from them. I got new lappy so I rang up to start up my internet stick. They said I owed them 700. I was peed off. He said you missed payments and we charged late fees. They said I had to pay all up right away. I couldnt so i said cancle my contract they charged me 200 for that. After I explained what the lady told me they said no I have to pay. It is not our fault. So I got a loan payed and then they had the nerve to ask me to make another contract with them. I said HEC NO.

Customer support is always a bit of a pain due to being put on "first level" support by default which is painful for anyone who is technically experienced.

Despite my reservations, there's nothing wrong with Telecom.

I browsed around a lot before choosing Telecom, originally wanting a really reliable provider with a good reputation like Actrix but their prices made them unattainable. Telecom isn't the behemouth of hopelessness that it once was; I haven't had any disconnections since I joined, bandwidth drops a little bit during peak hours but I hardly notice, customer support is always a bit of a pain due to being put on "first level" support by default which is painful for anyone who is technically experienced. Despite my reservations, there's nothing wrong with Telecom, and I've had a far better experience with them than either Vodafone (constant disconnections for up to a day, hard to reach customer support) or TelstraClear. I'm on the 120 GB + home line plan and live in West Auckland (near Henderson).

Internet drops out repeatedly, customer support are great tho (the ones you can understand lol). They are very expensive as well compared to smaller firms providers. Your never going to get your bang for your buck with telecom. They will always overcharge. Just a little advise if by chance you get disconnected you get put on temporary disconnection meaning you can't ring out but people can ring in you will still be charged FULL monthly amount even tho you are only getting half the service.

Dreadful. They are very strict on their plans (little to no lenience for custom deals) and the tech support is mediocre but solves 95% of problems. On rare occasion you will be put with someone who is actually living in New Zealand. Connection speed is unreliable and varies between 50kbs-1mb. Upload speed won't go above 300kbs and downloading maxes the internet unusable. The modems they give you for free is also budget pre-programmed hardware that disconnects randomly. Oh and if you go over your limit, they drop you to 8kbs (generally sits on 4kbs) which won't even allow you to load google.

Horrible speed, unreliable connections. Drops out for no reason, gets annoying when I'm actually using the internet, and the ping is just horrible. I'm in the Queenstown region. Also the speed drops in random times of the day and the upload speed is just sluggish. I cant even host a game server for my friend to play on, who lives about 5 blocks away because of the horrible lag. People are paying high amounts of money for the service and all we get is the finger from telecom. Congrats telecom, you also have a 1 Star rating on speedtest.net website. Keep up your "great" service.

Telecom's service has been absolute rubbish. 6 months ago we had severe disconnect issues, the net would be down for days at a time, in the middle of suburbia. Nothing wrong at our end. After paying to have their technician come out, who confirmed the absence of any faults at our end, the net magically worked after a couple of days of frustration. Then a couple of weeks ago, the net went down again for 5 days straight. Despite multiple calls to telecom, the problem was "at our end". Our first tech call wasn't escalated appropriately, second call 2 days later they offer to send out a technician to fix our non-existent problem for $80. We pay this company hundreds of dollars a month for service and they gave us #%£*. Never evr using Telecom again. They do not know anything about customer service, and haven't since they moved their call centre to the Philippines.

24 hour support is complete rubbish, Tried to call over easter weekend and was told I called out of office hours. Too many different numbers to call for different issues so keep getting transferred from team to team. Fed Up and Changing

When I purchased business the previous owner unfortunately requested cancellation of internet account with Telecom. It was leading up to Xmas and is a business that is dependent on internet for marketing, bookings and communication with customers. It took Telecom THREE WEEKS to reconnect account. Countless hours on the phone, countless stuff ups. No compensation. Will never be a customer of theirs again.