Manaaki Broadband

MANAAKI Broadband Acceptable Use Policy

1. Acceptable Use Policy

Netstar is committed to providing its customers with the highest quality Broadband Internet services possible. This Acceptable Use Policy outlines what constitutes acceptable use of the Netstar Internet services (collectively known as the "Netstar Service") and outlines permissible and prohibited activities for using the Netstar Service to access the Internet.

As a telecommunications services provider, Netstar is subject to regulatory requirements and codes of practice which protect the community at large by upholding contemporary social standards and protecting the overall national Internet infrastructure.

At Netstar we recognise and appreciate the importance of these requirements, and strive to maintain a high standard of ethical and professional conduct.

All Netstar customers and all others (collectively known as the user or you) who have access to our network are responsible for complying with this Acceptable Use Policy, and all other Netstar policies, including but not limited to the Netstar Terms and Conditions and Netstar Privacy Policies. By using the Netstar Service, you confirm your acceptance of this Policy and all other policies.

Our Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") is intended to:

  • provide information to our customers on their legal obligations and liabilities in making use of Netstar services;
  • provide information to our customers on the legal obligations of Netstar as a telecommunications services provider, to ensure that our customers adhere to their legal obligations;
  • explain the remedial measures that may be taken by us against any defaulting customers;
  • provide a description of practices by our customers which are considered abusive and therefore are prohibited; and
  • explain the limits of liability of Netstar.

Failure to comply with these or any other Netstar policies may result in the suspension or termination of our services to you.

If you engage in any prohibited activities outlined in this Policy while using our services, we reserve the right to immediately terminate the Netstar Service and the user account without warning.

Netstar reserves the right to revise this Policy from time to time without notice by posting a new or amended version of this document on the Netstar website at http://www.netstar.co.nz/. The new or amended Policy is effective immediately upon posting and it is your responsibility to adhere to any amendments.

Your use of Netstar services shall at all times be deemed to be in agreement with this policy and our Terms and Conditions Policy, Privacy Policy, Telephone Services Policy and Complaints Policy.

2. Prohibited Uses

Prohibited uses include (but are not limited to), using the Netstar Service to upload, download, post, publish, transmit, re-transmit, reproduce, distribute, store, undertake to, or partake in:

  • Any unlawful activity of any sort or for any purpose that constitutes or encourages criminal or civil breaches of any statute, regulations, government requirements or any other law (including general or common law) of any country. Those breaches include, without limitation, breach of intellectual property rights (such as copyright, trademarks, patents, trade secrets and confidential information); defamation; breach of obscenity laws and laws as to objectionable publications, such as pornography and hateful materials; fraud; theft; misappropriation of money, credit card details or personal information; breaches of privacy obligations; and trade practices legislation, examples of which are the Fair Trading and Consumer Guarantees Acts (New Zealand) and the Trade Practices Act (Australia), or any activity that violates any local, national, state, foreign or international law;
  • Using Netstar services for the promotion of deceptive and or illegal marketing practices, products or services by any means including, but not limited to, online trading sites, bartering sites or any other online site visited;
  • Accessing any other person's computer or computer system, software, or data without their knowledge and consent including breaching the security of another user;
  • Obtaining any software or other material through the Netstar Service that is protected by copyright or other proprietary right, including intellectual property rights, without the approval of the legal owner;
  • Restricting, inhibiting, or otherwise interfering with the ability of any other person to use or enjoy the Netstar Service, including, but not limited to, posting or transmitting any information or software which contains a worm, virus, or other harmful feature, or generating levels of traffic sufficient to impede others' ability to send or retrieve information;
  • Transmission of unsolicited bulk or commercial messages (SPAM) by any means, including, but not limited to email, instant messenger services and newsgroup postings. See point 7, Spam;
  • The creation, transmission or forwarding of chain letters or other schemes and scams of any type;
  • Deliberately receiving, sending, transmitting, posting, storing, or disseminating any information or material which could be deemed to be objectionable, threatening, defamatory, obscene, offensive, abusive, menacing, indecent, pornographic, harassing, embarrassing, distressing, vulgar, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, offensive towards any religious group, or otherwise inappropriate;
  • Sending email or any other type of electronic message with the intention or result of affecting the performance or functionality of any computer facilities;
  • Corrupting data;
  • The distribution or use of tools designed for, or that may be used for, compromising the security of the Netstar Service;
  • Unauthorised entry into the Netstar back office or operations platform or the hacking into any aspect of the Netstar service;
  • Circumventing, or attempting to seek to circumvent, any of the security safeguards of Netstar or any of its third party providers;
  • Breaking, or trying to break, the security of anyone else's equipment, hardware or software;
  • The impersonation of any person, computer address, sender address falsification, forgery of anyone else's signature (digital or manual), mail header information or any other similar activity whether on our network or external to our network;
  • Causing annoyance, nuisance, or breaking the rights of any other person;
  • Tampering with, altering or modifying any equipment that has been provided as part of the Netstar Service to you or any other user;
  • Violation of the rules, regulations, or policies that are or may be applicable to any network, server, computer database, or website that you or any other user accesses;
  • Excessive use of our network in busy times in a way which has a detrimental impact on other users of our services;
  • Using the Netstar service in a way that (i) risks degradation of service levels to other customers, (ii) puts our system at risk and/or (iii) is not in keeping with that reasonably expected of a customer in the circumstances;
  • The holding of Netstar or any of its third party providers or contractors liable in relation to the accuracy, reliability, availability and performance of resources accessed through the Internet which, you acknowledge, are beyond their control and are not in any way warranted or supported by Netstar or its third party providers or contractors;
  • Using the Netstar service in any way which, in Netstar's opinion, is, or is likely to be, detrimental to the provision of the service to any other Netstar customer. This includes, but is not limited to, running any application or program that places excessive bandwidth demands on the service for continued periods;
  • Performing any activity which does not comply with applicable laws in New Zealand; or
  • Permitting any third party to do any of the above.

3. Responsible Use

Users must use Netstar services in a responsible manner taking into account:

  • the effect that use may have on networks, equipment and other parties;
  • compliance with netiquette, newsgroup and Internet conventions, as well as restrictions in rules, charters, FAQs and similar newsgroup, website and email mailing list material;
  • that such use must not interfere with the availability of any of Netstar Services to others, or any other services including services offered by Netstar and other Internet providers and carriers to others; and
  • that customers must take reasonable steps to prevent IP spoofing, using IP to verify unicast reverse path and IP address filtering wherever appropriate.

4. Excessive Use

Netstar shares access with other providers to the greater Internet. It is the user's responsibility to ensure that their actions while using Netstar services do not impact on the experiences of other Netstar users. As such, Netstar will take action on specific users that are deemed by us to be utilising Netstar resources so excessively that they may be impacting other users. This includes but is not limited to the amount of data that may be downloaded in a month or part of a month that is in excess of your Netstar Plan.

Whilst Netstar provides unlimited broadband plans as an option for customers and does not rate shape or throttle, it does however set a limit for data usage per month to specifically exclude excessive use and abuse of the Netstar service. Unless specific arrangements are made with Netstar by a customer on a case by case basis, Netstar defines its unlimited broadband internet plans as any monthly data throughput usage by a customer up to a maximum of 2TB per month. The 2TB limit is at a level which would be expected to be downloaded when streaming an HD film or TV series from Netflix, Lightbox, Apple TV or YouTube for a continuous 24 hours a day for an entire month. This limit is also considered to be adequate for most gamers in New Zealand.

Netstar actions may include:

  • warning the customer that continued excessive downloading may result in further action;
  • shaping, filtering, excluding or prohibiting the further downloading of further data, either entirely or on certain types of traffic;
  • applying excess user charges for any data consumed over the 2TB combined download/upload monthly limit, unless specific arrangements are put in place by the customer prior to such usage;
  • continued excessive downloading may result in the cancellation or suspension of the account without warning; and
  • Netstar may, at its discretion, reset your connection to ensure that the service cannot be used in this manner.

5. Industry Codes

You must not use Netstar Services in a way that breaches any material standard, code and content requirements produced by any relevant authority or industry body.

6. Electronic Mail

The Netstar Service may not be used to send unsolicited bulk messages. Failure to abide by this condition may result in the suspension or termination of your account with us.

7. Spam

It is the users' responsibility to ensure that they do not participate in any spamming activity either knowingly or unknowingly to originate, transfer or relay messages deemed to be Spam from their computer.

Spam includes, but is not limited to:

  • any communication that is in breach of the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007;
  • unsolicited emails without identifying an easy way for the recipient to stop receiving more emails from the originator of those emails;
  • unsolicited bulk email, being a single message to more than 12 destinations, whether newsgroups, email addresses or websites, where there is no pre-existing business or personal relationship with the recipients;
  • messages or emails that could be expected to provoke complaints;
  • chain letters, pyramid schemes or hoaxes;
  • emails and messages that do not accurately identify the sender's return address, header or domain name; and
  • sending unsolicited emails and bulk mail from another provider, advertising or impacting upon the use of any of the Services.

If we identify a user that is spamming Netstar will:

  • immediately block the user from being able to continue to spam;
  • send an email to the user outlining the reason for the block and explaining that they must provide proof that they have cleaned their computer before having their address unblocked; and
  • continue to block the user until they have provided proof that they cleaned their computer from any ability to participate in spamming.

Continued participation in spamming activities will result in Netstar permanently blocking the user from the network.

8. Simultaneous Connections

You must not have more than one connection to our service using your user ID at any time. If you do have simultaneous connections we reserve the right to charge you for each additional connection.

9. Static IP Addresses

Static IP addresses may be provided to customers on request at Netstar's discretion. Please contact us to discuss conditions and terms as charges may apply.

10. Content Ownership and Protection

The customer is solely responsible for the ownership and protection of all content or information residing on, obtained through or transmitted via the Netstar service.

It is the customer's responsibility to provide appropriate protection for the prevention of minors, being persons under 18 years of age, from accessing any unsuitable or restricted material published via any service.

11. Copyright and Related Exclusions

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the customer agrees that Netstar and any of its related parent or subsidiary companies and assigns will not be responsible for copyright infringement including the illegal downloading and/or distribution or public performance of copyrighted motion pictures and/or television shows, and/or unauthorised access to or alteration of the customer's communications or data, any material or data sent or received or not sent or received, any transactions entered into through use of the Internet Services, any threatening, defamatory, obscene, offensive or illegal content or conduct of any other party or any infringement of another's rights, including intellectual property rights. The customer also agrees that Netstar is not responsible for any content sent using, or included in, Netstar's Internet Service by any third party.

12. Passwords

Passwords provided to customers are intended exclusively for their personal use. Customers shall be responsible for protecting passwords from and against misuse by unauthorised persons. Customers must immediately change passwords suspected of being disclosed to unauthorised parties. Where applicable, customers must immediately request that a new password be issued by us. Customers bear all the risk arising from the use and/or misuse of user ID and passwords, including costs associated with the issuance of new passwords.

13. Security

As a registered user of Netstar services, you, the customer, are responsible for any misuse of the Netstar Service, even if the misuse was committed by someone else with authorised or unauthorised access to your Service account. It is your responsibility to ensure you take appropriate measures to ensure that others do not use your account to gain unauthorized access to the Netstar Service by strictly maintaining the confidentiality of your service username login and password. Netstar will not be responsible for any actions and consequences resulting from username and passwords being compromised. These will remain the sole responsibility of the customer.

The customer must not use Services to breach, or attempt to breach, the security and operation of any network, equipment or any other system. This includes hacking, cracking into, monitoring, or using systems without authority; scanning ports, including scanning for open relays; improper configuration of mail servers and FTP servers enabling distribution of spam and unlicensed material by others; interference of service to any user or network, or activities that might encourage such interference by others, including mail bombing, flooding, deliberate attempts to overload a system and broadcast attacks; denial of service attacks or activities which might encourage denial of service attacks by others; unnecessarily excessive traffic, including excessive pings; distributing viruses, or other harmful material or software; any communications across the Netstar Services which do not accurately identify, or disclose in a manner that is misleading, addresses, headers, names and other relevant details; and using our network in any way as a staging ground for any of those breaches or to disable or crack other systems.

14. Consequences to Defaulting Users of Unacceptable Use

Non-compliance risks termination of service. By using our services, you agree to comply with all parts of this Acceptable Use Policy, and we may terminate your account if you fail to comply with any of these rules. If we believe that you are using our services in any of the ways prohibited by this Acceptable Use Policy, we are entitled to reduce, suspend, restrict certain types of traffic on your Netstar service, and/or terminate any or all of your Netstar services without giving you notice.

Non-compliance may also result in a formal warning. Notwithstanding our right to immediately reduce, suspend, limit the speed and/or terminate your Netstar services and/or restrict certain types of traffic on your service, if you abuse the Netstar services and/or breach this Acceptable Use Policy, you may receive a formal warning from us specifying the unacceptable conduct and notifying you that repeated breaches may result in your service being temporarily or permanently withdrawn from you.

15. Abuse Procedures

If you encounter an incidence of abuse on the Netstar network, please notify us using the email address networkabuse@netstar.co.nz. We will investigate it and take appropriate action as soon as possible.

16. General

Netstar reserves the right to investigate any suspected violations of this Policy. If necessary we may gather information from the user or users involved and examine material on Netstar servers and network.

During an investigation, Netstar may suspend the account or accounts involved and/or remove or block material that potentially violates this Policy. Netstar and the customer will cooperate with law enforcement authorities in any investigation of suspected illegal activities or if requested for any other legal issue or activity. This cooperation may include Netstar providing available personally identifiable information about you to law enforcement agencies, including, but not limited to, username, subscriber name, and other account information if requested.

Netstar offers protection against spam and viruses, but you understand and agree that we cannot guarantee 100% protection against attacks via our service. As such, we will not take any responsibility for damage to property or other losses, including loss of time or income. The failure of Netstar to enforce this Policy, for whatever reason, shall not be construed as a waiver of any right to do so at any time. You agree that if any portion of this Policy is deemed to be invalid or unenforceable, that portion will be construed consistent with applicable law as nearly as possible, and the remaining portions will remain in full force and effect.

You agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless Netstar against all claims resulting from you engaging in any of the prohibited activities listed in this Policy or resulting from your violation of any other posted Netstar policy. Your indemnification will survive any termination of the relationship.

17. New Zealand Law

All services are provided by Netstar under New Zealand law.