James
CEO / Founder

Wow, it’s April already, the year is going by so fast, still, at least it means Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns, and that extra hour of sleep that Daylight Savings lets us have (when you read this it might not quite be April yet, but I have always been a man ahead of my time ☺)

We have been flat out upgrading many of our rural wireless towers this year (on the days where the weather has been good enough, or nearly good enough to be on hilltops), and are now about to start upgrading customers from Shannon to Apiti and Table Flat onto our new radios and higher speeds. We are also about to complete the upgrades on the first leg of our main Tararua wireless tower from Dannevirke to Porangahau to Akitio, and upgrades for all those customers will start in early May. We have a goal to knock off our 2 larger towers in Woodville and Eketahuna before Winter properly hits and then we’ll have a little break until Spring when we will begin our upgrades through the Rangitikei District and on into Whanganui.

At the same time, we have been completing a lot of work in the back end of our fibre network to make it all go faster and to ensure it deals with the rapid growth of Netflix and other streaming services.

In September this year Inspire Net turns 20. It’s hard to believe where it has got to so far, from its humble beginnings in the garage at my home, to outgrowing Cloverlea Exchange when we got to over 2000 dial up lines and having to move downtown, to now having nearly 40 staff and supporting around 15,000 customers, and being a major sponsor of lots of the great things that happen in our community. I am sure Karina will be planning lots of things to celebrate our turning 20, so if you don’t already, follow us on Facebook, or keep an eye on these Almost Monthly Newsletters to be in with the chance of winning some of our celebration giveaways and promos.

Paul
General Manager

It’s been a busy start to the year with all of our RBI2 upgrade work, and we have added another member to our Infrastructure Team. Campbell started with us straight after the New Year.

We also have a Massey Graduate working with us on Friday afternoons for the next 6 months. Dara is a 4th year intern that is completing a Marketing and Communications degree, and is undertaking some research for us as part of her qualification.

We are farewelling one of our helpdesk agents after Easter. Sonny is off on his big OE and we wish him well with his adventures, we will definitely miss him around the office. We’re currently looking for a replacement helpdesk agent and hope to have this role filled very shortly.

There have been a couple of calls to our helpdesk over the past few months regarding Rented Routers and accessibility. We recently rolled out a new system that allows us to program our rented routers automatically. In future, this will provide you with the ability to make changes to your connection settings from our website without needing to contact our helpdesk. However, if you are a power user who wishes to have full access to your router then please feel free to install your own at home.
Please note: our Inspire Voice service only runs on our rented routers.

Just a reminder that we do offer Direct Debits. Once it’s set up you no longer need to remember to pay your account each month. It’s our preferred method of payment, so if you’d like to set this up all you need to do is fill in the form and get that back to us. Download form here:
https://www.inspire.net.nz/assets/pdf/directdebit_form.pdf.

As we continue to grow my goal is to ensure that the customer experience remains the same friendly, professional, easy to deal with company that we have always been. As we come up to 20 years of being in business and supporting the local community the only difference some long-term customers will have noticed is that James hasn’t been answering the helpdesk phones himself for a few years now.

If you have any feedback, suggestions or concerns please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Karina
Design, Brand and Sponsorship Manager

There has been a lot going on this year already and I thought it would be a great opportunity to cover off a little more about what we’ve been up to.

This year we jumped straight in and started work on our first ever site at the Central Districts Field Days! Not stopping there, we had at the opportunity to sponsor ‘Stuff’ and the Field Days, which has started a great partnership which we’re proud to be part of. We had naming rights to an “Inspire Net Hangout zone” providing free Wi-Fi along with bean bags, beach umbrellas and a giant Jenga set which was well used! We provided free Wi-Fi in the food court area and were the preferred provider of Wi-Fi for exhibitors at the event.

The CD Field Days was a great few days for us, our voice phone service was a very popular add-on, and we also did a lot of checks for frustrated people wanting to move to Inspire, so hopefully we can connect a lot of those families too. We really enjoyed meeting a lot of you in person, so thanks for popping in to say ‘hi’.

A few pics from the CD Field Days

We have launched our brand-new website, which we’re adding to and tweaking every day. We’ve created a testimonials section, some of the latest sponsorship partnerships we’re involved with around out region and some further afield, as well as working on some further features which should make checking if Inspire is available at your friends place a whole lot easier. Let us know your thoughts on the updates, and if there is anything you would like to see added please let us know. Check it out here: www.inspire.net.nz

We’ve all been very energetic this year so far too, and have sponsored our staff teams in the Manawatu Netball Inspire Net Twilight series, Indoor Cricket, and a few have even signed up for a run in the Great Forest Events coming up very fast!

Our front desk will be closed over the Easter break, but our helpdesk will be available as per usual from 7am to 10pm, so feel free to give them a call on 0800 484 363 if you need anything.

Have a great Easter break with family and friends.