Received a phone call from Spark earlier today trying to discuss my current plan (and try upsell me broadband )Questioned if there is any new plans with more data coming soon and he stated they are releasing, as of tomorrow. The $79.99 plan is increasing its data from 5GB to 7.5GB (So an extra 2.5gb per month) and from the sounds of it a couple of the other plans are increasing or changing as well (I think theres a $99 plan to come out - I could be wrong with that)Will be interesting to see what the changes are on the other plans, but good to see Spark stepping up!
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New Spark Mobile Plans - Tomorrow
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How long will Spark keep my call history for if I request it through the Call Investigation Centre?
I was just wondering how long spark will keep my call history for if I request it through the call investigation centre? Presumably they will email my call and text history to me so I am wondering if they will have a record of that history in their email for a long time? I am not sure how comfortable I am with having my call history always accessible if they keep it for a long time once I request it as I kind of like that they only keep records for a certain amount of years. Does anyone know how long it will be kept for? If they no longer have it after a very long time, say 25 years, even this would be good to know as it would be good to know it is no longer accessible after a certain time frame even when you've requested and received it over email. Does anyone know if you can request for your provider to delete your call and text history, even including the call history you request and receive via email? Thanks.
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Help! Landline phone calling cellphone number by itself
For the last 3 months 'the phone' has been calling a specific cellphone number 4-5 times a day.After speaking with the owner of the number, he has acknowledged receiving the calls and says they sound like a fax machine calling.The following is attached to the landline:x3 phones - x2 cordless with built in answering machine (they're a set) and x1 corded.x1 monitored medic alertThere is a house alarm but it is not monitored.I have spoken with Spark. They have ruled out faults on the line.I have spoken to Chubb for monitored medic alert. All ok there.Spark suggested perhaps it's a setting on the cordless phone that's causing the problem?Has anyone heard of this happening before or do you have any ideas of what could be causing this?
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TrueNet needs Volunteers
TrueNet needs 10 ADSL volunteers on Spark to be panellists on our testing and reporting project. We have a new contract with the Commerce Commission to continue testing and reporting. There are some changes though, and as a result we now need a few more Spark ADSL panelists. It would be great if your area is not going to get fibre for a couple of years to help us to keep our numbers up. We have had so many panelists migrate to fibre that we actually have enough spark fibre testers already. Please volunteer here, the link takes you to our FAQ to assist you to see what you get from us - GigE router with double reach Wifi - Our probe - the wifi is recommended for use. MikroTik RB/951G-2HnD - with our firmware installed so it is not a "free" router
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Spark mobile late fee - out of control
I happened to pay my mobile bill late, thanks in advance to all those people who are about to say 'pay it on time and it won't be a problem, cheers got that'.The bill was paid before the next one arrived however obviously not soon enough to escape the dreaded late fee.What I noticed shocked me $18.40 late fee on a $59.95 account, that's 30.6% interest per month, surely this couldn't be considered reasonable cost recovery on such an amount - they make pay day loan companies look like the good guys.If you were a perpetual late payer you'd pay $220.80 just in late fees per year.So I've solved the problem by moving to Skinny Direct and while in a round about way Spark will still get some money they've halved their ARPU so well done Spark.
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Port fowarding with the HG630b
Hello,My intention is to open a minecraft server for me and friends to use privately on my network.During the setup process I used two online open port check tools (canyouseeme and yougetsignal) to check if i had successfully opened the desired port(25565). Alas neither tool could confirm that I had opened the port. After checking to see if my settings were correct and having an IT savvy friend(who also made his business an internet cafe/computer maintenance), confirm that they were in fact at least looking correct I've been unable to get a successful result from previously mentioned sites. As stated in the title the router in use is the Huawei HG630b provided by Telecom(now Spark). I may be able to provide screen caps of information at request. I hope to be able to achieve my goal with your help. Thanks for your time. ~TarrynEdit1: I was following instructions on portfoward and Sparks guide for the HG630b.Edit2: Ahh sorry everyone, I fixed it on my own. I needed the application running in the background.
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Connecting to my home PC remotely - timing out
Hi,I am trying to connect to my home PC from outside of my home network. I have Spark at home. I used to be able to do this over a year ago without any problems but now I cannot. I have all the port forwarding set up (VDSL router -> wireless router -> home PC)I tried a tracert from my work to my Spark IP and it appears to be timing out of a jetstream node (the IP of which is NOT my home WAN IP) 1 XXX 0.540 ms 0.468 ms 0.440 ms 2 ge-1-1-1-240.core-1.ive.chc.unleash.net.nz (116.90.138.221) 1.436 ms * * 3 * * * 4 ae5-4020.core-0.que.akl.unleash.net.nz (116.90.129.73) 14.800 ms * * 5 * * * 6 * * * 7 tengigabitethernet1-1-0-331.wntnz-rt1.fx.net.nz (202.53.187.30) 29.971 ms 29.991 ms 29.972 ms 8 tengigabitethernet0-2-0-540.wnmur-rt1.fx.net.nz (202.53.187.237) 29.983 ms 29.906 ms 30.100 ms 9 tengige0-0-2-0-317.chrev-rt1.fx.net.nz (202.53.187.46) 29.213 ms 29.368 ms 29.529 ms10 122-56-224-12.mobile.spark.co.nz (122.56.224.12) 31.172 ms * 122-56-224-12.mobile.spark.co.nz (122.56.224.12) 30.831 ms11 125-237-160-1.jetstream.xtra.co.nz (125.237.160.1) 34.135 ms 31.568 ms 30.606 ms12 * * *13 * * *14 * * *15 * * *16 * * *17 * * *18 * * *19 * * *20 * * *21 * * *22 * * *23 * * *24 * * *25 * * *26 * * *27 * * *28 * * *29 * * *30 * * *I tried contacting Spark and got put through to their "Broadband Expert" (in India?!) who told me that they "do not support port forwarding or VPN so I should contact my IT support"...This sounds like baloney to me. Does anyone have any advice as to whether this looks like a problem on my end or Spark's end?Cheers
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Spark 100/20 UFB plan
Hi
Can someone advise if the Spark UFB plan (100/20) come with a fixed external IP address?
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Anybody else in chch having internet issues spark 14-9
Anybody else having sporadic connection issues in Christchurch. Sometimes will connect to sites then other times won't resolve and says no internet connection. On fibre The usual's have been tried , resets and change to google dns but same result.
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Changes to Xtra email - YOUR ACTION NEEDED
At last Spark is ending that joke of email service with Yahoo. The service is being moved to SMX.More information and action here: About Xtra Email Move.The press release now:Spark has announced today it will be moving its Xtra email service to New Zealand-owned email provider, SMX.Spark will be seeking customers' permission to move their data from today and will progressively move Xtra customers to the new email platform over a three month period from January next year. The company will be communicating directly with customers to let them know about the changes and what to expect over the coming months. All customers will keep their existing Xtra email address.Spark Home, Mobile and Business CEO, Jason Paris says that its decision to partner with Auckland-based SMX is great news for customers and for New Zealand business. 'Our customers tell us that their email service, including their @xtra.co.nz email address, is critically important to them. After a positive nine year relationship with Yahoo, we have decided to transition our email service to SMX, a New Zealand based provider. We know that email is a critically important service to our customers and we are dedicated to making this transition as seamless as possible for our users. 'To manage the migration securely, all customers must give us their permission on the spark website to migrate their Xtra email address, contacts and data. All those who register before 17 October will be in a daily draw to win $100 Prezzy cards. We'll be in touch with all of them over the next few months, explaining the process and the benefits they'll see,' said Mr Paris. Bringing customers' email data home Mr Paris says the company is pleased to be partnering with a stand-out New Zealand company. 'SMX is one of the leading cloud email providers in New Zealand and we are confident in their ability to bring customers' email data back home, safely and securely. Partnering with SMX will allow us to move all of our customers' valuable email data back to New Zealand and host it locally in our own state-of-the-art Takanini data centre.' Last year Spark successfully moved over 11,000 Spark business mailboxes to SMX on its new Business email platform. Minor disruption to customers Spark says it is doing everything it can to ensure minimal disruption to customers' Xtra email service in the next few months as the company will carry out a significant amount of work behind the scenes to ensure the migration runs as smoothly as possible. Once customers give permission for the migration their email accounts will be officially ready to move over to the new platform. It's expected most customers won't need to do a thing after that, only IMAP* users will need to make a small update to their email settings to access the new platform. Most of the migration work will be managed in off-peak hours at night, and the majority of customers are unlikely to notice any interruption of service. Customers will need to opt-in to the migration process as soon as possible to ensure their contacts, calendar entries and emails are migrated from Yahoo - they will retain their Xtra email address.Customers can go to www.spark.co.nz/email for more information or they can call a dedicated Xtra helpline on 0800 934 348 if they have any questions.
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Internet keeps dropping out today
We are on Spark Fibre 200/200 in Christchurch (so Enable).Today our Internet keeps dropping out for about 30 seconds at a time. Doesn't seems to be any pattern to it, but has done it several times. Noticed it because RDP sessions would stop responding, and confirmed by running a continuous ping to 8.8.8.8 and observed several timeouts at the same time as the RDP sessions stop responding.Anyone else having issues today?Thanks
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Router connection dropped, wont reconnect
Had our router drop its connection to internet at about 12:08 today. We are in Freemans Bay, Auckland on a Fiber connection using a 3rd party Ubiquiti router.I have called support and gone through the rudimentary problem solving;- Reboot Chorus/Spark fiber to copper media convertor/router- Reboot my ubiquiti router- Attempt internet connection, with no change- Run ping 8.8.8.8, no packets returned- I haven't changed any of the configuration of my router for me to cause this- I can see my router sending TX packets specific to PPPoE virtual int but no RX packets are coming inAny chance anyone is having issues that a similar? Or have additional troubleshooting ideas?Thanks!Marty
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District Wide Landline outage
Hi, I live in the Mackenzie Basin, and am hearing from people in Tekapo, Albury, Fairlie, Clayton - a pretty big geographical area - that their landlines are out. This has been the case for several hours now, but the helpline is still telling people (even 5 minutes ago) that there is no issue in the wider area and it is likely an issue on their property, and they will book a Chorus tech who will be here sometime between Saturday and the middle of next week.Clearly this isn't the case - and several hours into the issue Spark seem none the wiser. Can anyone shed any light on this type of fault and any insight on how and when the penny will drop for spark that this is a wider issue?!
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Recurring issues with Spark DNS server
I work for a web design/web hosting company that uses Spark Fibre for our office internet. We are on a business plan, not a residential plan.As part of what we do we often update the DNS records on our clients domains in order to move them over to our hosting, I completely realise that DNS changes take time to propagate, that's not what the issue is.What I'm noticing is that ns2.xtra.co.nz is usually pretty quick about picking up the updated record, but ns1.xtra.co.nz is much slower, and more alarmingly, for a reasonable period of time (a few hours at least) it will randomly return either the old or new IP address.This is frustrating because it means that for a period of time we can only inconsistently access the new site, and I found it pretty concerning that a single server doesn't consistently return the same result, I can understand it being stuck on the old IP address but returning two different results within seconds of each other is very strange.I've noticed this on a few different domains on separate occasions, so it doesn't appear to be a one-off thing.I'm testing this using a command along the lines of "nslookup example.co.nz ns1.xtra.co.nz", so I believe I should be bypassing any caching on my end, whether in the OS or at the modem/router level.I have attempted to contact Spark support using the usual channels but to be honest, the ones I've talked to don't seem to have the level of technical knowledge to understand what I'm talking about.The other frustrating thing is that it will resolve itself after a (seemly random) period of time, so often by the time I notice the issue, and get through the hold times to manage to talk to someone beyond the first line of defense the DNS server has started being consistent again, even though it was definitely playing up all morning.I do have another client domain that was updated today, which I suspect will be in the midst of the issue, however I can't confirm that it's playing up as I have a different ISP at home and can't query the xtra servers. I'm happy to PM this to one of the Spark guys for them to test.So basically I'm asking, has anyone else noticed this issue or can confirm what I'm seeing?Is there some secret code (shibboleet?) that would allow me to talk to someone at Spark who understands what I'm actually talking about, when the issue occurs again? Thanks in advance,James
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Anyone having issues this evening (15/9) with Fibre?
My connections dropped twice (that I've noticed) in the last half hour.2016-09-15 21:16:01 User Level Notice Action GetTotalBytesSent from executed by UPNP/TR064 successfully.2016-09-15 21:15:53 User Level Notice CWMP:Cwmp post inform success.2016-09-15 21:15:52 System Notice Message type: Query, Querier: 192.168.10.254, Group: 0.0.0.0, version: 3.2016-09-15 21:15:52 User Level Notice CWMP inform message: parameter change.2016-09-15 21:15:52 User Level Notice CWMP inform message: event: 4 VALUE CHANGE.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice WAN connection INTERNET_UMTS:IPv4 connected.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP IPCP received Configuration Ack.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP IPCP sent Configuration Request.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP IPCP received Configuration Reject.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP IPCP received Configuration Nak.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP IPCP sent Configuration Request.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP IPCP received Configuration Reject.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP IPCP sent Configuration Ack.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP IPCP received Configuration Request.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP IPCP sent Configuration Request.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP PAP authentication succeeded.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP LCP received Configuration Ack.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP LCP sent Configuration Ack.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP LCP received Configuration Request.2016-09-15 21:15:47 System Notice PPP LCP sent Configuration Request.2016-09-15 21:15:44 System Notice DNS query failed: Name: www.google.com, Type: 1, Error: time out2016-09-15 21:15:44 System Notice DNS query failed: Name: www.google.com, Type: 28, Error: time out2016-09-15 21:15:44 System Notice DNS query failed: Name: www.google.com, Type: 1, Error: time out2016-09-15 21:15:44 System Notice DNS query failed: Name: www.google.com, Type: 1, Error: time out2016-09-15 21:15:42 System Notice PPP LCP sent Termination Request.2016-09-15 21:15:40 System Notice DNS query failed: Name: www.google.com, Type: 1, Error: time out2016-09-15 21:15:39 System Notice PPP LCP sent Termination Request.2016-09-15 21:15:39 System Notice WAN connection INTERNET_UMTS:IPv4 disconnected.(ERROR_NO_CARRIER)2016-09-15 21:15:39 User Level Notice Action GetTotalBytesReceived from executed by UPNP/TR064 successfully.Ironically the second time it happened was while I was about to download a syslog server since the router logs retention seems limited.
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Roaming
Are there any known plans/rumours that Spark will be doing anything to improve roaming on their account plans?One of the best things about VF is the $5/day roaming and Spark seem curiously uncompetitive around that.
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hi, welcome to spark. you've successfully reached the voice testline. you can hangup now.
Hi,I am "boarding with non tech family who decided to change over from Vodafone Fibre 30/10? plus landline to Spark 100/30 + landline.This happened on Wednesday but the telephone is giving the above response to all outgoing calls.The owner has called Spark twice but has no ETA for resolutionI do not know what the landline number is supposed to be so haven't tried calling it.The telephone line from the ONT is plugged into a jack point via an ADSL filter, as it was with the Vodafone connection.The modem has changed from an Huawei HG659 to an HG659B.I read an earlier thread from 2005 that said that the install wasn't completed so suspect this is the case here.Is there anything I can do to expedite this?I note that the helpful pictures in the modem sheet show the ONT directly connected to a telephone, not through an ADSL filter. Is this an issue?Not expecting miracles, only asking to find out more about the processes. First time I have been involved in a city install for quite some time, and only really as a beneficiary of it, not in control.Oh yes, trying out the new PC with W10 as well! May the old HP XP Pro rest in peace soon.
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Spark wifi trumps UFB
It's amusing to get a personal mailing from Spark offering Spark Broadband wireless just as Chorus starts to UFB cable my street. Fancy that.It's even more amusing that a whole bunch of houses around here can't get a connection to Spark 4G anyway!
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Getting VDSL installed, what should I expect?
I am getting VDSL installed tomorrow. What exactly should I expect from the chorus technician?What do they actually do? Anything in particular that I should be weary of or look out for? Thanks!
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Can you actually disable Voicemail Viewer or will it just keep turning back on?
Way back a while ago, I asked Telecom to disable the voicemail viewer on my account because, frankly, it's terrible. I was on the phone with them for an hour trying to diagnose why I was never receiving the voicemail notifications - and when they found an apparently "corrupted" notification and cleared it, I received every voicemail notification from the previous three years. Basically, not a service I'm willing to rely on. They dutifully disabled the stupid thing, and I found that a year later it had re-enabled itself (and, of course, stopped notifying me of voicemails). I called them up again, and once more they disabled it. Now, 2 months later, I find that it has again re-enabled on my account.Can I actually turn the stupid thing off and have it stay off? It is not a useful service to me. And with the uselessness of it, I'm tempted simply to forward all calls to my 2talk number just so I can get voicemail with notifications that work.(Also, does any telco actually treat voicemail as a real service? Telecom's is dodgy, 2degrees deletes your mailbox every 60 days, and lord only knows that Vodafone does).
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