Help Centre

Ultra Fast Broadband is the term used to describe the new fibre optic network which is being installed throughout New Zealand. This network will eventually replace most of the existing copper based services and not only be used for internet but also TV, medical monitoring and many other services.

If the service is available to your location we should be able to get you connected. The process for shared driveways and multi-tenant buildings has not been defined by the network providers, and due to this, the standard lead times do not apply. We will work with you to get you connected if you fall in to this category.

In some cases your existing equipment may work with our UFB service. However, we have designed the service to work with the equipment we provide so using another device may impact stability and performance.

At this stage the network is not yet available to all locations. If your new house does have the service available when you have a new installation, you will receive a new UFB ONT.

You can ‘port’ your current local number to Inspire Voice. There can be a small amount of downtime as the number moves between providers but we’ll do our best to minimize any delay.

Sometimes installing cable is just not a viable option, especially in a lot of rural areas which is where Inspire Wireless comes in. We have over one hundred access towers around the central North Island which provide internet access over radio signals.

While it’s not quite as quick as fibre it’s far more accessible and still provides a fast and stable broadband internet connection.

Our wireless network is able to provide download speeds of up to 50 Mbit/s with very low latency (lag), making the Inspire Net Wireless Service a great alternative for fast Internet access. It beats dial-up hands down for convenience and performance.

We currently service most of Manawatu and other areas around the central North Island. Please call our Help Desk during office hours for up-to-date coverage information, as we are constantly expanding our wireless network.

The technology we use has proved itself to be extremely reliable, and we are confident that you will be happy with its performance. However, no connection (wireless or wired) is immune to unforeseen disruptions caused by weather, accidental damage or other factors outside our control. Please bear this in mind.

Yes – we have a fee for standard installations which is $249. Standard installations are where we use one radio unit to receive the direct signal from our access tower.

It is possible to have a complex installation too though, depending on many factors such as where you live, if there are any hills, trees or buildings in the way of the line of sight to the access tower. Where we would need more than one radio unit to ‘bounce’ the signal from one to the other to get sight of the access tower, there is an additional cost of $150 per radio unit.

Sometimes laying cable is a better option to installing a number of radio units. If that’s the case, Inspire Net will supply the cable for you so all you need to do is dig a trench and lay it. Don’t worry, our installers have likely completed a site survey for you if you need this option, and they will talk you through what needs to be done and leave the cable with you. Once the cable has been trenched, we’ll come back and hook up your internet. There is no additional charge for the cable and the installation charge would be the standard price of $249.

The three different installation fee types are:

• Standard installation fee - $249
• Complex installation fee (additional to the standard fee) where a bounce / additional radio units are required - $150 each radio unit
• Cable run - $249, with free cable supplied

If you have any questions about installation costs, give our Helpdesk a call on 0800 484 363 – we’re happy to answer any questions.

All prices are GST inclusive.

Inspire DSL uses Chorus’ Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology to deliver internet access over normal telephone lines.

DSL is often refered to as 'copper broadband' due to the use of copper telephone lines. This technology is being phased out as fibre broadband becomes increasingly available.

While not as fast a fibre; DSL can still deliver fast and reliable internet in areas where fibre is not available. The speed and quality of the service is heavily reliant on the quality of the phone lines in your area.

We will help you configure the DSL router with the right settings to log on to our Inspire DSL service. After that, you are ready to go.

The ADSL Settings are:

• Connection Type: PPPoA VC-Mux
• VPI : 0
• VCI : 100
• Security Protocol : PAP

The DSL router should assign the DNS server automatically, but if you need to do it manually, use these settings:

• Primary: 203.114.168.2
• Secondary: 203.114.128.2

Inspire Net, regularly celebrated for providing the best internet service in New Zealand, brings you Inspire Voice.

Inspire Voice is available as an add-on service on any Inspire Net MetroLAN and Fibre plan. Now there is no need to keep paying your “landline tax”. You can ditch your existing landline provider and keep your existing local number if you choose.

All voice lines include call waiting, caller-ID (available with a caller-ID capable phone), voicemail service, do-not-disturb features and various “who called me” and privacy features.

Inspire Voice is a phone service which, unlike a traditional phone service, requires a working internet connection and mains power to function. We therefore do not guarantee that our service will always be available and advise customers to have a separate voice service (e.g. landline or mobile) and/or a battery backup for emergency calls. Many services, such as monitored alarm systems and medical alerts, will not function over VOIP. If you have any services that rely on a phone line we strongly suggest contacting your services provider to confirm whether their service can be adapted to work over our internet connection.

The short answer, no. With our phone product we need to ensure the best possible service for our customers. It’s very simple for us to ensure the quality of the call (Quality of Service or QoS) over our MetroLAN products or over UFB and our wholesale provider has put measures in place to ensure the best possible phone service over DSL or BoostVDSL.

We have no methods to ensure the quality of a phone call over our other connection methods like Inspire Prepay or Inspire Free WiFi or any connections provided by other ISP’s. As such, in the interests of providing a great service we do not supply phone lines over the other products.

The short answer, no. With our phone product we need to ensure the best possible service for our customers. It’s very simple for us to ensure the quality of the call (Quality of Service or QoS) over our MetroLAN products or over UFB and our wholesale provider has put measures in place to ensure the best possible phone service over DSL or BoostVDSL.

We have no methods to ensure the quality of a phone call over our other connection methods like Inspire Prepay or Inspire Free WiFi or any connections provided by other ISP’s. As such, in the interests of providing a great service we do not supply phone lines over the other products.

If you have our Inspire phone service, here are the international calling rates.

Setting up your voicemail

Dial *55 from your phone and follow the prompts. If you are not aware of what your pin number is, please call the Helpdesk on 0800 484 363.

Getting your messages online

In general your voicemails will be emailed to you. Please follow the instructions here if you need to change to a different email address. If they are not emailed to you, you can:

• Log into the Inspire Net website and choose your voice account using the drop down list (eg. Username-voice). Click on Messages.
• Dial *55 from your phone and follow the prompts. If you are not aware of what your pin number is, please call the Helpdesk on 0800 484 363.

Receiving voice messages to your email

Dial *55 from your phone and follow the prompts. If you are not aware of what your pin number is, please call the Helpdesk on 0800 484 363.

Inspire Prepay is an Ethernet and Wireless service we supply in select locations which allows you to pay for your connection in advance for the period you select, with a limit speed feature just like standard home broadband connection. At the end of this period you do not need to pay until you wish to use it again. This is great if you are a visitor to the area, a student or do not use the internet regularly.

Inspire Prepay can be accessed at locations in various regions of the central North Island such as the Manawatu, Rangitikei, Tararua and Whanganui regions. Give us a call on 06 357 8559 or toll free on 0800 484 363 to find out where.

Inspire Net also provides both wired and wireless prepaid connections on campuses, military bases and similar environments. You can connect to the Prepay network when you are within range of a Prepay hotspot or connect to a jackpoint in your hostel.

When in range of our Prepay network you will need to connect to the Inspire Prepay network SSID using your computers built in WiFi manager. You may also have access to a high speed wired network connection in selected locations, such as Massey Hostels and @TheHub.

Once connected, open your internet browser, this will take you to the Prepay page. If you browser does not immediately take you to the sign in page you can go directly to prepay.inspire.net.nz.

From here you can sign up for a new account or sign in to your existing one. If you have any trouble connecting or signing up pleased call us on 0800 484 363.

Inspire Free WIFI (previously known as Central Free WIFI) is a public, free internet access internet service providing a limited amount of data for free per device per month. All WIFI devices can access the Inspire Free WIFI wireless network if they are within coverage of an access point.

Inspire Free WIFI is a filtered internet service; access to some sites will be blocked by our automated filter. Due to the nature of the internet we cannot guarantee that all objectionable content will be blocked or that all content that is blocked will be objectionable. You can contact us at info@inspirefreewifi.co.nz if you have any queries regarding content filtering on Inspire Free WIFI.

For more information go to inspirefreewifi.co.nz.

Inspire Net is an official New Zealand registrar for Domain Names.

You can now register most types of domain names online by going to our Inspire Net Domain Registration page.

Yes, but only if you are already an Inspire Net customer, with existing account details. If you are a new customer living overseas it may be more appropriate to research other domain name providers who may be able to help.

Inspire Net charges $45 (inc. GST) per annum to register a domain name. This also includes DNS services for this domain name.

John Smith has decided to start his own business named “John Smith’s Really Cool Company”. He wants to establish an online brand, promote his business name in all of his advertising and also protect his online identity.

He chooses to register johnsmithsreallycoolcompany.co.nz as he’s checked out Inspire Net’s domain extension list and .co.nz is most suitable for his New Zealand based company.

John also realises that johnsmithsreallycoolcompany.co.nz is a bit of a mouthful and chooses to also register jsrcc.co.nz as a shorter domain name.

He looks up both domain names using Inspire Net’s domain name checker and finds they are both (unsurprisingly) available. He fills in our web-based domain name form and registers both domain names.

At the same time John also establishes an account with workspace.google.com. He's decided to use Google as one of many options for business email. He then contacts domains@inspire.net.nz to request we setup DNS, including mail MX records to connect his new domains with his mail pprovider.

Finally, John sets up webhosting with Inspire Net (a cost of $25 p/m) and contacts a web-developer recommended by a friend to set-up his website for him.

We sure do.

We can offer either static HTML hosting or we can offer hosting for more dynamic content that can give you access to PHP and also a MySQL database if required.

We offer two main plans for webhosting:

• For $25 per month you get 1000 megabytes of storage, and 1 terabyte of monthly data transfer, with PHP and MySQL available if required.
• For $50 per month you get 10 gigabytes of storage, 2.5 terabytes of monthly data transfer, with PHP, MySQL and also allows the use of a unique IP for your site and an SSL certificate if required; annual fees will apply in this case.

We also provide custom hosting solutions - contact us for more information.

To sign up for this please see our webhosting sign up page HERE.

If you need any further details about any of our hosting plans, including what versions of PHP and MySQL are available then please email our Hosting Team

While we highly recommend registering your domain or transferring it to Inspire Net along for ease of management, we can still host for you if you want to keep your domain name elsewhere, or can't transfer it to us. In this situation it will be your responsibility to make sure the domain directs to the hosting IP address we will send you.

Please ensure that the content you intend to host is legal before putting it up on the Web. Take legal advice first if you are unsure.

Adult content hosting is subject to full review of the material in question and must not breach any applicable laws in any of the countries that it may be viewed in.

All Inspire Net hosting plans include AWstats for detailed breakdowns of your site's traffic, with reports accessible from anywhere.

We do not presently offer the use of cPanel or similar panel systems for managing domain names and databases due to low demand. However, our friendly hosting team are always ready to assist you in configuring your hosting so that your sites work the way you need. Sites can be administrated via FTP, FTPS, SFTP, and phpMyAdmin.

Inspire Net does not allow the storage of credit card information on its shared hosting systems. We highly recommend a payment gateway system like Windcave (DPS Payment Express) for this purpose.

If you use more than your allotted usage or bandwidth, Inspire Net may contact you and request you reduce your usage or upgrade your plan. We will allow you time to reduce the usage without penalty, and we will not bill you for the extra usage.

In practice, we do not often contact customers in this way unless system resources are low, or if they are using far more space or bandwidth than normally allocated to them.

• Debian GNU/Linux 12 "bookworm" (64 bit), with Linux kernel 6.1.0, on a system with at least 8 cores and 8 gigabytes of RAM
• Apache HTTPD 2.4, including mod_expires, mod_headers, mod_rewrite, and many other standard useful modules. If we do not support a module you need, feel free to contact us to ask if we can install it for you.
• MariaDBMariaDB 10 (MySQL compatible), listening on localhost only
• PHP 7.4 via mod_php (presently) or PHP 8.1 - 8.4 via PHP-FPM , including MySQL interfaces (MySQLi, and PDO), SQLite with PDO, cURL, FFmpeg, GD, and ImageMagick. We will consider extra modules if they are standard and well-supported on customer request.

This software will easily support modern content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, and the vast majority of the plugins/extensions to these systems. If an extension to your system does not work on your hosting, you can always contact us to see if we can sort it out.

Keeping your website’s software—like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla—up-to-date and secure is the responsibility of you and your web developer, but we might notify you and other affected customers via email if we become aware that a particularly serious vulnerability in popular website software is found on your website. These email messages will also point you in the right direction for getting the problem fixed.

We do not have formal guarantees for uptime for shared hosting plans. However, in practice, our monitoring system shows our shared webhosts are up and responding correctly 99.99% of the time. If upgrades are required for shared hosting servers requiring more than a minute or two of downtime, we schedule these in our webhosting maintenance window from 1am to 3am each day. In practice, these upgrades do not tend to take longer than an hour or two and are not normally required more than once a year.

If you require better uptime than this, or you need to have these necessary outages arranged with you, we recommend one of our colocation or premium hosting plans.

Inspire Net Co-location Service customers are responsible for insuring and maintaining equipment hosted at our premises.

We can help organise competitive quotes from insurance brokers if you need. Please contact us at office@inspire.net.nz.

Please ensure that any content you intend to host on servers co-located at Inspire Net is legal before putting it up on the Web. Take legal advice first if you are unsure.

Here is a link to our main sponsorship page.

We’re proud to help out our local not-for-profit and community organisations, particularly those in the Central North Island area, with sponsored free webhosting. Register with or move your domain name to Inspire Net, complete the Web Free sponsorship agreement and send it to sponsorship@inspire.net.nz.

We’ll get in touch to confirm if your sponsorship has been accepted. Please note that we do not sponsor annual domain name fees.

You can pay your bill online through our customer portal, by direct debit, or by calling our office during business hours.

If you are a residential customer, payment is due within seven days of the date of your invoice. If you are a business customer, payment is due by the 20th of the following month. You can pay by:

• Payment online
  Make a direct payment online to our bank account:
  
  Inspire Net Limited, ASB Bank
  12-3143-0117509-50
  Please make sure you use the reference number mentioned on your invoices. This is usually an upper case "T" followed by a number.
• Direct Debit
  You can pay by direct debit. Download the direct debit form here, complete and post it to us at PO Box 4387, Palmerston North. We will then send it to the bank after we have added your details into our system.
• Cash
  Our office is open from 8:30am until 5:30pm weekdays. You are very welcome to pop in and talk with our Customer Services representative who will help you with your account payment.

A data cap is the amount of information you can send and receive per month on your connection. Generally, basic use such as email and web browsing does not use much data and a lower data cap plan should be sufficient. If you use your connection to watch on demand TV, online videos (such as YouTube), play online games or use any other higher data-use applications you will find a higher data cap will be more suitable.

If you find you have used more than your data cap, you can change to one of our higher level plans.

If the internet service we provide is unsuitable due to material failure, you have the right to exit your contract without penalty. However, we reserve the right to attempt to repair/improve the service before the contract is voided. Some troubleshooting steps from the end user may be required during this process. If the issue is determined to originate from within our network or that of our wholesale provider, and is not related to the end user's internal network or devices, the contract may be deemed void and any disconnection fees will not be applied. Please reach out to our support team for assistance if you encounter ongoing service issues.

You can check your usage by logging on using the 'My Account' button on the Inspire Net website.

The 'My Dashboard' page gives an overview of your account including data usage, while the 'My Broadband' page lets you view monthly, daily, and hourly traffic per account.

Log in using the 'My Account' button on the Inspire Net website, and then click on the 'Account Details' tab. You can then click on 'Change Password' and set a new password. Note: If you use your for email authentication you will need to update it on your devices.

You will need to enter your current password first, then your new password twice to confirm.

Please ensure you choose a secure password. If you need help or advice around password security; give us a call.

Your username cannot be changed, however you can add a different email address in the form of an alias that will point at your current Inspire Net email address.

Please call the help desk on 0800 484363 for more information.

Absolutely! Contact our support team for personalized assistance.

We can forward up to five Inspire Net email addresses to your existing email address at no extra cost. You can also choose to have a separate email address with its own username and password for an additional $3/month. Please get in touch to discuss which option will suit you best.

While we recommend that email addresses are kept as short as possible for convenience, and to prevent typo's, they can contain up to 32 characters.

Note that there are limitations as to which characters you can have in an email address. For instance, dots and underscores are valid, but ampersands (&), strokes (/ or \), spaces or colons (: or ;) are not, as they are used for special purposes by email programs.

Inspire Net offers a Web mail service that lets you read and reply to email from just about anywhere. Just go to the Inspire Net Webmail page and bookmark it for future reference. You can also scroll up this page, and use the Login to your Webmail button.

You can set up your Inspire email on your mobile device as well. Please feel free to contact our helpdesk if you need assistance.

Yes, head over to your webmail by logging in with your username and password and you will see all the emails in your account that haven’t been downloaded.

Select the one or ones you wish to delete. Remember that there is no way to undelete messages that you have deleted, so be careful to check first.

Yes, we most certainly do. Inspire Net has a very strict anti-spam policy and if you are found to be violating it, your account will be suspended without notice. Our terms and conditions explicitly ban spamming, so don’t even think about it.

An automated email is sent to our customers when they reach 80% or 100% email storage.

While you can clear your emails from within your device's email program, the best way to perform this task is to log into your Inspire Net Webmail account (https://webmail.inspire.net.nz/) and clear it from there. This allows you to see all of your emails that are stored in our mail server along with how much storage space you are using.

You will need your email account username and password to gain access.

The best place to start is to delete any emails that are no longer required, or check and remove any spam to bring this down to below the 2GB limit.

You will receive another email from us once your email storage is back under 100%.

If you need further assitance in reducing your email storage space, please give us a call on 0800 484 363.

Try restarting your modem/router first. If the issue persists, run a speed test and contact our technical support team with the results.

We use something called "Fixed IP addresses" for our connections. These IP addresses typically stay the same, unless there's a need to modify them. Rest assured, we'll give you advance notice if we ever need to make changes.

This information is generally only relevant for broadband connections.

• Primary DNS Server: 203.114.168.2
• Secondary DNS Server: 203.114.128.2

Authenticated SMTP is now available from Inspire Net. This is a very useful setting if you use more than one Internet Service Provider; are commonly using your laptop from WIFI hotspots, a mobile datacard, or from your mobile phone.

SMTP Auth access must be enabled for your account on our server before you can use it. Please call Inspire Net on 0800 484 363 if you would like it enabled.

• Hostname: securemail.inspire.net.nz
• Port: 25 or 465

If you're a technically-inclined user, and you're interested in trying out our in-development IPv6 connectivity on your connection, please see here: https://ipv6.inspire.net.nz/

We provide internet services throughout the Manawatu region and surrounding rural areas. Contact us to check availability in your specific location.

Click the Export entry In the left menu of the Address page in AtMail. Once clicked, it provides a file named book.csv as a download.You can then import this into Roundcube's address book, via Contacts > Import. If you’re having trouble, give us a call.

If you are using Address Book Groups, using Import Group Assignments on the Roundcube import may work with the csv file exported from AtMail.If you have large groups that are too big to manage manually, give us a call.

By default, Roundcube has a Junk folder instead of Spam. If you move an email to Junk, It’s the same as if you were to move it to Spam on the previous AtMail system.To change the folder name to Spam, you can go to settings > preferences > special folders > enable “Show real names for special folders”

Yes, by default the date is set to YYYY-MM-DD and HH:MM (24hr) but there are lots of options to choose from under:Settings > preferences > user interface > "date format” / “time format”

Unfortunately this is not a feature of Roundcube. The Delete key works well though.

This should now be configured to display, however if you still can’t see the incoming email addresses, just go to settings > preferences > display messages > enable “Show email with display name” > save.

We’re currently using a plugin that allows this, you can find details under settings > filters.

Spam is the email equivalent of the junk mail that ends up in your letterbox. Spammers (people who send spam) send vast amounts of spam to every email address they can get their hands on. Unfortunately, there is not an equivalent of a ‘No Circulars’ sign for email, so we have special filters on our mail server which attempt to identify spam emails.

If you see an email with ***SPAM*** at the beginning of the subject line it means that we have identified it as spam.

Our SPAM filtering is a free service that can cut down the amount of junk mail received by our customers. Emails that are considered SPAM-like are tagged with ***SPAM*** in their subject line so you can easily identify them. They can then be automatically moved to a separate folder so your inbox remains clean.

Our spam filtering uses a combination of open source and commercial applications. Each email received by our mail server is analysed for spam like qualities. For example we will take a look at an email with the subject of "Mortgage rates at 40 year Low AA".

Inspire Net offers some very efficient spam filtering. Login using the 'Login into your Account' button on the Inspire Net website with your mailbox username and password. Once logged in, click on 'My Email' to view your email accounts. Here you can:

• Turn off virus checking (not recommended)
• Change the spam filtering level
• Delete or tag spam

Please note that when you choose to delete spam, deletion is final and while it will stop anything we identify as spam getting to your inbox, any mail incorrectly identified as spam will also be blocked.

There are four levels of SPAM filtering available:

1. No Filtering
2. Lightweight Filtering - filters only the really junky emails
3. Medium Filtering - should filter most junk mails
4. High Filtering – almost all spam is filtered

We do our best to keep spam under control however no spam filter is perfect and any level of filtering will let through the occasional spam message, there is also a chance (especially on the higher levels) that legitimate email could get caught as well. We do not recommend using the high filtering level in conjunction with any method of auto-deleting spam.

New mailboxes are set up with medium level spam filtering by default.

Inspire Net Co-location provides a secure and hassle-free environment with excellent network connectivity for hosting your servers. It offers a cheaper alternative to hosting the servers on your own premises, yet offers the same level of convenience and control.

The network for the Inspire Net Co-location service runs over multiple fibre-optic links through several different backbone providers for redundancy, ensuring your data will always get through.

Our team of skilled technicians monitor the Inspire Net Co-location service network throughout the day all-year-round. Downtime is not acceptable to you, nor is it for us.

The Inspire Net Co-location Service Network room is a secure facility with climate control and individual uninterruptible power supplies for each server rack.

Contact us on 0800 484 363 to discuss co-location options for your servers.

At Inspire Net we’re all about being fair with our customers. What you think about us is also important so if there’s anything you’re not happy about in your relationship with us the sooner you let us know, the sooner we can fix whatever is causing the issue. We want you to be perfectly satisfied with the service we provide so should a situation arise where you have a problem or a complaint, we are committed to resolving the issue quickly and fairly. Further, if you think one of our products or services can be improved in some way, we would love to hear from you.

Here’s how you can contact us to provide feedback or make a complaint

We encourage you to contact us in the first instance to give us an opportunity to answer, and fix if required, your query or complaint.

1. Call us

You can reach us on 06 357 8559, or toll free 0800 484 363, Mon-Fri 8 AM - 8 PM, Weekends/Holidays 9 AM - 6 PM.

We are available every day of the year, except Christmas Day. We have trained staff waiting to answer your call and help you out, and you'll find most problems can be easily resolved over the phone.

If for any reason you are unhappy with our resolution or feel your problem has not been resolved adequately, you can:

2. Write to us:

• Email us at helpdesk@inspire.net.nz
• or by posting your letter to: Inspire Net, PO Box 4387, Palmerston North, 4442

3. Lodging a complaint

If you are lodging a written complaint it will be registered though our Complaints process which uses a numbered ticketing system. So once we have received it, you'll receive a unique reference number acknowledging that we have your correspondence. We'll get this acknowledgement to you within at least two (2) working days from receiving your complaint.

Your complaint will be investigated and responded to in full within five (5) working days from the date we first received it. An initial response could be made to you by telephone but we will also write to you confirming Inspire Net's position and explanation.

If further information is needed, or a more detailed investigation is required to make a response fall outside of the five (5) working days timeframe, a further fifteen (15) working days will be allowed.

During this period your complaint may be escalated to the CEO for review.

At each stage of this resolution process though, we will be in touch with you to make sure you know what’s happening.

While we will do our utmost to resolve your complaint, we understand that some situations require additional mediation. In such cases, we suggest submitting a claim to the Disputes Tribunal of New Zealand (https://www.disputestribunal.govt.nz)