Into The Future with Netspeed

We've joined a revolution. The Netspeed revolution; fast broadband on the road, for minimal cost and no fixed plan. This has to be the best thing since sliced bread, a change to life on the road as we know it.

One major issue we have had with living on the road is the very expensive data we require to access the internet, no matter the supplier or the package, whatever way you look at it, mobile data is expensive. We've lived with it and put the expense into the 'must have, use prudently' box.

We're both heavy internet users although I use more data than most because of my blog and Flickr photo uploads. My average monthly data usage was a carefully managed (measly) 8GB (David's slightly less), and at $20 a GB this soon adds up. Of course we had phone plans that are a little cheaper and include other services but still, those home dwellers with a landline and huge or unlimited gigabytes have no idea how much you were envied- if only we could have access to a tiny portion of your surplus data, we'd have been in seventh heaven.

Then along came Netspeed, first a trickle of information with a very good recommendation and then an avalanche of delighted customers. It was time to join the revolution.

We now have access to 130gb of data a month at a cost of  $100- 80gb peak period and 50gb off peak (10pm-6am) (ETA Jan2017- this has now been increased to 120gb peak & 50gb off-peak at no extra charge). This is after the one-off expense of purchasing a 3/4G Wifi router which comes with a 240/12v power adapter (rr$350). Because we spend a lot of our time in the back country, we have gone for a more powerful antenna which was around $150, this should give us better reception in low coverage areas (if your time is spent in mostly urban areas then an antenna is not necessary). We're under no allusion that there will still be some places we have no reception, Netspeed uses Vodafone's network of towers so the coverage will be similar. But hey, we can live with that, we still need some of that no-gadget time.

And, it was so easy to install; out of the box, plug it in, set up the account and away it went, with a row of flashing lights welcoming us to the other side. David will be wiring it into the 12v power supply and it'll sit behind our satellite TV box sharing the shelf and out of the way.

So, no more data watching, no more mad scrambles to click out of automatic playing newspaper clips that chew through valuable data, no more missing out on a funny YouTube clip that's had everyone laughing, no more sitting outside pink boxes in the dead of the night or the cold of a winter's day with people looking sideways at you as they pass, no more cafe stops to get free wifi (I'm not so sure that's a good thing), no more backload of app updates waiting for free wifi to update, no more parking on family's lawns and plugging into their network for free (well, ok, that'll still happen) and no more clicking in and out of our phone hotspots to access the internet.

Instant, continuous, fast and cheap mobile broadband! Oh the joy, we are finally free from the shackles of expensive mobile data. Netflix here we come!

Obviously, we'll still have a Spark plan on our mobile phones but it'll be nowhere near the cost we're paying now. Just enough data to cover a little surfing when we're away from the mother ship.

Netspeed can be contacted on 0800 Netspeed or 0800 638773 and if you are in the Canterbury/Marlborough area you'll have the pleasure of dealing with David Gabites, who we highly recommend.