Category: Jump Ciena

As indicated in my earlier post, it is time to start applying the brakes for new applicants to the Ciena plan. We have nearly reached our target number of new sign-ups since the extended sponsorship was announced in December 2023.

The Skinny Jump team has agreed to continue supporting any applications received until 31 May 2024, when the Ciena Plan will be removed as an option in the Jump Profile form.

Please make sure that all staff involved in Skinny Jump sign-ups are aware of this, so they don’t inadvertently offer this option to a new family after 31 May 2024.

Please withdraw all the Ciena Jump for Students Fund referral forms and any Ciena Jump signage so that frontline staff do not offer this by mistake. You may wish to store these securely, in case the Skinny Jump team is able to secure any further sponsorship.

Just to confirm, the offer of a free internet connection continues until the end of 2024 for all families signed up to Ciena before 1 June 2024. At this stage we have no indication whether the scheme will be continued in 2025; the default is that all customers on the Ciena Plan will revert to standard Skinny Jump on 1 January 2025, unless advised otherwise.

What an amazing effort – you have signed up 451 new families to the Ciena plan since the start of the year. So, we are now on the countdown to our target of 600 for 2024. At the current rate, we’ll reach our target in about 4 weeks.

And who are our Ciena Partner champions? 68 partners have signed up a family to Ciena; the total number of issues since the start of 2023 is 1296. Here are the top 30%.

I have had a few inquiries from partners about offering the Skinny Jump Ciena plan to their communities – remember this gives families with school-aged children free access to the internet for the rest of this year. I have scheduled a briefing for these prospective new partners for Thursday 15 February at 11am. You can sign up here.

Existing partners are welcome to join in as well if they would like a refresher on Ciena. 38% of our partners have signed up less than 5 families during the last 12 months, so I can understand if our processes are a bit fuzzy.

The most important thing to remember is that a Skinny Jump Profile Form must be completed for all Ciena sign ups, whether a new modem is being issued or whether a family is transferring from a standard pre-pay Jump connection. The form initiates the modem provisioning process. And of course we do need a scanned or photographed copy of the Ciena Jump for Students Fund referral form.

Existing partners should receive the new pad of referral forms (with 31 December 2024 as the end date) today or tomorrow. We will send a pad of these forms to any new partners after the Thursday briefing.

What a fantastic start to the new year – by 8 February, 139 more families with school-aged children were benefitting from a free internet connection for the 2024 school year. So a few things to note (mainly for Ciena partners) but if you are not already a Ciena Partner and really want to offer this to your community, please send an email to jump@diaa.nz.

1. We would love to reach our target of 600 new families by the end of March. Families will then get the maximum benefit with at least 9-10 months of free internet. Those who have already signed up will be getting 11 or 12 months.
2. All families who signed up in 2023 have had their Ciena plans automatically extended until the end of 2024.
3. We have just received supplies of the 2024 Ciena Referral Forms and will be couriering these out to Ciena partners over the next few days. Please consign any old forms that you are holding to your paper recycling bin.
4. When scanning the Referral Forms to jump@diaa.nz it would be really helpful to have the parent/caregiver name in the email subject line; we struggle at times to read handwritten names on the referral forms. Some partners already do this – thank you.
5. There is some confusion about how customer accounts are provisioned for Ciena. This is not an automatic process. First of all we must have a Profile Form completed, whether this is for a new customer or an existing Jump customer customer transferring to the Ciena plan. This then triggers a request to the Skinny support team to provision the customer’s account for Ciena – this can take 1-3 days. We (DIAA) receive a notification when the account is provisioned and send a confirming email to the customer (see text of email below). This can also take a couple of days, depending on our workload. But even though it could take up to a week from the time the customer gets their modem, they do have their start up 35GB to keep them going and when their account is provisioned they immediately get a full month’s data allowance of 210GB.
6. The text of the email that we send to customers to confirm that their modem has been provisioned is as follows: 
   • I am pleased to confirm that your Skinny Jump modem (Broadband number {{Description}}) has been provisioned for the CIENA plan.  This means that your account has 210GB data that will expire at the end of this calendar month and a new 210GB data added on the first day of next month.  This will now continue until December 2024. Ciena approved this extension for another year on 15 December 2023.
   • Please note that as this is a sponsored plan, it is not possible to top up your account – if you use your whole data allowance in less than a month, the internet will stop working and you will have to wait until the first day of the next month to get another 210GB data, so we do encourage you to keep an eye on your data usage on your Jump Dashboard or App.  If you find that the data allowance really isn’t enough for you and your family, then you might want to check other ‘on account’ plans, but of course you will have to pay for these.   There is no penalty if you do choose to change to another service.
   • If you do wish to cancel your Ciena Jump service for any reason during the year, please return the modem to your nearest Jump delivery partner, so that we can reset it and reissue to another family.
7. We have had some requests from customers on the Ciena Plan to revert back to standard Skinny Jump. You might think this is rather strange – why would anyone want to give up a free connection for a paid one – well we did get an explanation from one customer. With the Ciena Plan, 210GB of data is loaded onto the customer’s account on the first day of each calendar month. The customer explained that her kids managed to use all this data within the first couple of weeks, and since there is no option to top up sponsored accounts, she didn’t have any internet until the start of the next month. She preferred regular Jump where she could manage her children’s time on the internet and top up as required. If you do find any customers asking to revert to standard Skinny Jump, you should use the Modem Returns process to get the modem reset; your customer will need to set their modem up again and establish a new account, but they will be able to use their same email as the modem reset process delinks their email from the modem.
8. Another thing to watch out for is when a customer on the Ciena plan returns a faulty modem; make sure you always complete a new Profile Form, clearly stating that the customer is on the Ciena plan and wishes to remain on it. This will then trigger the Ciena provisioning process as for new signups. The only difference in this case is that these customers do not need to complete a new Ciena Referral form.