Internet. Power. Mobile. Water. Groceries. Baby formula. Your nan. All on one enormous bill, all on one 72-month term, all impossible to leave. It's the Kiwi way.†
* Packet loss is a natural feature of the New Zealand landscape and is not covered by any guarantee. † "The Kiwi way" is a registered trademark of Snail Holdings (Cayman) Ltd. Speeds shown are theoretical, measured at 4:15am on a public holiday, on our engineer's laptop, plugged directly into the exchange, in a different country.
Within spec (spec: 0–100%)
Routed via Gore
Yours is shared, and it is in Gore
On track. Still.
Broadband plans
* Prices shown exclude GST, the Broadband Levy, the Rural Levy (applies in Ponsonby), the $49 Connection Admin Fee, the $12 Paper Bill Fee, the $12 Paperless Bill Fee, and the $99 fee for reading this sentence.
For people who have wronged us.
$89/mo
then $134/mo after month 3, forever
◆ "Unlimited" means unlimited up to 400GB, after which we shape you to 1.5 Mbps and describe this internally as "the Trickle experience".
Our most popular plan.
$129/mo
then $189/mo, then +CPI +9% every April
◆ 900 Mbps measured downstream of the congestion, upstream of the truth.
For people who read the brochure and believed it.
$299/mo
then $399/mo after month 3, forever
◆ 4 Gbps is the theoretical maximum of the ONT, the router and the will to believe, all at once.
You will not need another provider. Or another decision.
$449/mo
plus everything in the fine print
◆ Formula plan auto-renews for 18 years regardless of whether a baby is present, arrives, or consents.
Build your bundle
* "Save" here refers to a saving experienced by Snail.NZ.
$0/mo
Tick a service to get started.
By clicking you agree to the Terms, the Other Terms, the Terms that supersede the Other Terms, and to be contacted by us on channels you have unsubscribed from.
Limited time, ends when you notice
Sign a 72-month Everything Bundle and we'll send you a television. It is a real television. It has one HDMI port and a remote that controls a different television.
Advertised RRP
$329
RRP set by us, this morning
What it cost us
$61
Bought 400 of them, sight unseen
Profit we make off you
$11,880
Over 72 months. The TV is 0.5% of it.
† TV ships within 90 business days of month 13. If you cancel before month 72 the full $329 RRP becomes immediately payable, plus a $75 Gift Recovery Fee, plus freight both ways, plus a $40 fee for us having to think about the TV again. The TV is not covered by warranty, consumer guarantee, or hope.
📺Your gigabit Ethernet port is rated at 1,000 Mbps. A single AetherPod X9 is rated at 11,000 Mbps.
Cables are legacy. Cables are latency. Cables are furniture. AetherPod™ removes every cable in your home for $0/mo per pod, in exchange for 6 to 24 months added to your term, per pod.
| Ethernet (legacy) | AetherPod X9 | |
|---|---|---|
| Rated speed | 1,000 | 11,000 |
| How that's measured | end to end, sustained, one device | every band on every pod, both directions, simultaneously, in a lab, no walls |
| Cables required | 1 | 0 |
| Latency | 0.3ms | 61ms |
| Self-healing | no | yes |
| Works with the lights off | yes | not on AetherLux™ |
| Has an app | no | yes |
| Monthly cost | $0 | $0 |
| Term added | none | +6 to +24 mo per pod |
| Verdict | slower | FASTER |
Ethernet's figure is the speed one device actually gets. AetherPod's figure is every radio added together.
3 rooms
Pods recommended
7
by our Sales team
Monthly rental
$0
genuinely free, non-optional
Added to your term
+84 mo
12 months per pod
Throughput at pod #7
14.1
Mbps, after Coverage Multiplication™
Verdict
Still faster than Ethernet ✓
Ethernet would have delivered 1,000 Mbps down a $12 cable. Ethernet cannot self-heal.
⚪Dual-band. Entry level. Two-pod minimum, three-pod recommendation, four-pod outcome.
+6 months per pod
🔷Tri-band. One band is reserved for Dedicated Backhaul™, which is shared.
+12 months per pod
🗿1.1 metres of matte basalt-effect polymer. No lights. No ports. No explanation.
+24 months per pod
Radio is crowded. Light is not. AetherLux™ replaces your bulbs with Snail.NZ LED fittings rated 18,000 Mbps◆ each, which we add to your fleet total. It is downlink only: your laptop cannot emit light, so everything you send still goes back over the pods.
Light is the medium, so the medium has to be on. A room with the lights off has no internet, a room with no light fitting was never in coverage, and standing between the fitting and your laptop is a customer-side obstruction. We also supply your electricity, at a variable rate.
💡AetherLux™ A19 fitting. $0/mo, +9 months per room. Non-dimmable by design.
Dedicated Backhaul™
A radio band dedicated exclusively to backhaul, and to your devices, and to your neighbour's AetherPods.
Coverage Multiplication™
Every additional pod doubles your coverage and halves your throughput.
AetherMind™ AI
Continuously optimises your network by rebooting it at 3:04am, which is also when you can reach us by phone.
WiFi 8-Ready™
WiFi 8 does not exist. When it does, AetherPod will not support it.
AetherLux™ LiFi
Data delivered by your light fittings. Peaks at midday with the curtains shut, unavailable at night, when you are home.
MAC-Locked™
Your fibre connection only speaks to the MAC address of a Snail.NZ AetherPod. Plug in your own router and the light goes green anyway.
◆ All AetherPod™ speed figures are the arithmetic sum of the theoretical maximum PHY rate of every radio in the device, in both directions, on all bands, at once. No device has ever achieved them and none ever will. Real-world throughput depends on walls, weather, neighbours, the number of pods you were sold, and whether AetherMind™ is currently optimising. Pods must be placed at least 4m apart but no closer than 3.5m, at least 1.2m from walls, floors, ceilings and other AetherPods, a set of conditions our own engineers concede cannot be simultaneously satisfied. Firmware updates weekly, take 40 minutes, and are scheduled for 7pm. AetherPod™ does not support IPv6. Neither do we. AetherLux™ figures assume closed curtains and nobody in the room. Lighting is billed as electricity, by us. Pods are rented, never owned, must be returned in original packaging, and remain chargeable until received.
Our network
Snail.NZ operates two Points of Presence: a converted retail unit on Main Street, Gore, and a satellite terminal in Waitangi, on the Chatham Islands, 800km east of the mainland. Nearly every packet on our network still goes to Gore, is considered in Gore, and is sent back out of Gore. Whether you are in Kaitaia or Kaikōura, your traffic goes to Gore first.
🏢Primary POP: Main Street, Gore.
📡Failover POP: Waitangi, Chatham Islands. Has taken over live national traffic twice.
Day to day, Waitangi reaches the mainland over the AetherPod SeaMesh Fleet™, a relay of AetherPod™ units carried on fishing and supply boats scattered across the Chatham Rise, each pod handing the signal to the next boat within range until it reaches shore. Every pod runs on a solar panel bolted to the wheelhouse roof, backed by a two-stroke diesel generator for nights, fog, and salt spray, swapped for a three-stroke generator in winter, when a two-stroke is not considered sufficient.
Points of Presence
2
Gore, and the Chathams
Auckland to Auckland, via Gore
3,400km
Same suburb. Scenic route.
Redundancy
Chathams
Failover POP: Waitangi, Chatham Islands, one satellite dish
Shared wall with
bakery
Their oven is on our circuit
you@home:~$ traceroute 169.254.169.254 (neighbour's router, 11 metres away)
1 192.168.1.1 2.1 ms (your own router) 2 100.64.0.1 3.4 ms (CGNAT, also you) 3 100.64.12.9 8.9 ms (CGNAT, also you, again) 4 gor-agg-01.net.snail.nz 148 ms 5 gor-core-01.net.snail.nz 201 ms 6 gor-core-02.net.snail.nz 244 ms 7 gor-pe-01.net.snail.nz 288 ms 8 * * * (reoptimising) 9 gor-pe-02.net.snail.nz 331 ms 10 169.254.169.254 347 ms (neighbour) --- 10 packets transmitted, 6 received, 40% packet loss --- Status: WITHIN NORMAL PARAMETERS. Ticket auto-closed.
You will sit behind three layers of CGNAT with roughly 4,000 other households, all of whom appear to the internet as a single address in Gore. Benefits include no port forwarding, no self-hosting, no working game invites, and being blocked by websites because a stranger in Invercargill misbehaved on Tuesday.
A dedicated public IPv4 is available for $25/mo, or $25/mo, or $25/mo.
Our IPv6 rollout is progressing well. We have a slide about it. The slide has a globe on it. Our core cannot carry it, our billing system cannot store it, and nobody in Gore has asked. You may enable IPv6 below at any time.
Enterprise-grade transport
Most providers route residential traffic. We label-switch it. We bought the platform in 2009 to sell it to businesses. We sold four. The licence renews automatically and appears on your bill as the MLPS Levy ($6/mo), spelled that way since 2011.
99.9% uptime*
* Of our billing system.
Peering
We peer in Gore, with our transit provider, who is also in Gore.
Traffic management
We do not throttle. We prioritise other customers ahead of you.
Award-winning support
* "Here" is a data centre in another hemisphere. "You" is a queue position.
0800 SNAIL (0800 762 45)
Instant answers.
Our four-step resolution process:
Further escalation options may be available under the Telecommunications Dispute Resolution scheme. Details are provided on request, in writing, by post.
Selected from 41,000 pieces of feedback by our Sentiment Curation Team.
The important bit
We believe in transparency, which is why all of this is on the page and none of it is on the page you signed.
Minimum term is 72 months. The term restarts in full if you: move house, change plan, add a service, remove a service, update your email address, or speak to us.
Early Termination Fee = (remaining months × monthly charge × 1.4) + $199 Administration Recovery + the RRP of any gift + a Contract Sadness Levy determined by the retention agent handling your call.
Cancellation requires 90 days' written notice, posted, to a PO Box that was closed in 2017. Billing continues during postal transit.
Your price is fixed for 12 months, then increases by CPI + 9% every April. Fixed-term customers may not exit on a price rise, because the price rise is a term of the fixed term.
Your introductory rate ends silently. No notification will be sent, as notifications are a paid add-on ($4/mo).
Fees include: Connection Admin $49, Disconnection Admin $49, Paper Bill $12, Paperless Bill $12, Late Payment $25, Early Payment $25 (reconciliation burden), Direct Debit Dishonour $30, and a $9 Network Enhancement Levy that funds our naming-rights sponsorship of a stadium.
Advertised speeds are "up to" and describe the maximum speed of the technology, not of your connection, not of our network, and not of any night on which you wish to use it.
"Unlimited" is a marketing term and does not indicate an absence of limits. Limits are set out in the Fair Use Policy, which is set out in the Acceptable Use Policy, which references the Fair Use Policy.
Packet loss below 45% is deemed "nominal" and is not a fault. Packet loss above 45% is deemed "your router" and is also not a fault.
IPv6 availability statements are forward-looking and have been forward-looking since 2011.
Removing any one service from your bundle removes the bundle discount from every service, retrospectively, for the entire term to date, payable in one instalment.
Water is supplied by your council. We bill you for it, add 14%, and call it Snail Hydro™.
Grocery boxes contain what did not sell. Baby formula subscriptions run 18 years and are non-cancellable in the event of the baby growing up, which our modelling shows is uncommon.
Baby formula and Snail 'No Whey'™ are packed on the same line by the same two people. Where one arrives labelled as the other, the delivery is deemed fulfilled, the tin is deemed food, and the term continues. Substitutions final.
Your electricity plan is on a variable rate that varies in one direction.
We may vary these terms at any time by updating this page, which you have now read, forever.
Marketing consent is bundled with service consent and cannot be unbundled, in keeping with our philosophy.
Nothing in these terms limits your rights under the Consumer Guarantees Act or the Fair Trading Act, which is why the rest of this document is written the way it is.
Check your address to get started.
Step 1 of 2. Takes 30 seconds. Lasts 72 months.
Coverage depends on your location.
We will even pay your old provider's break fees.*
* Paid as an account credit released in equal parts across months 61 to 72.