Category: Jump Ciena

Shout it from the rooftops – Ciena extended for another year!!

The Skinny Jump team has been negotiating with Ciena, one of Spark’s equipment suppliers, to extend the Ciena programme for another year.

Today, Ciena said yes! Thank you to the partners who provided feedback on how much the programme is appreciated by their communities. This feedback was shared with Ciena and I am sure this helped secure the extension.

All Jump customers with an existing Ciena plan (over 800 families) will automatically have their free internet connection extended for a further 12 months and all new signups will receive a free connection until the end of December 2024. An email was sent today to all existing families advising them of the good news.

While the number of new connections is limited, we are keen to accelerate the signup rate so that as many families as possible get the benefit of a full-year’s sponsorship. We are working on some ideas with the Skinny Jump team, but do let us know if you have any suggestions. 

Ciena Jump signups rocket past 600

Another record month for Ciena Jump signups! 56 partners had signed up a whopping 619 families to the Ciena plan by the end of September (and already another 7 so far today – 3pm 2 October 2023).

This is a fantastic achievement. Linwood Library remains top of the leaderboard – in fairness they did have a sort of head start by collaborating with the Greater Christchurch Schools Network (GCSN) in 2022 and they did get the August Chocolate Fish award.

But with Ranui, Shirley, Hastings and Hornby libraries coming a close second for two months in a row, I think they deserve the sugar boost for September! So keep an eye out for the next courier delivery.

56626
Total Issues
Linwood Library8213%
Ranui Library579%
Shirley Library549%
Hastings War Memorial Library467%
Hornby Library437%
Wairoa Library315%
Otara Library295%
Manukau Library224%
Manurewa Library213%
Te Takere Levin213%
New Brighton Library203%
Glenfield Library142%
Kaikohe Library142%
Onehunga Library132%
Porirua Library112%
Rotorua Library112%
Glen Innes Library91%
Mangere East Library91%
Papatoetoe War Memorial Library91%
Wellsford War Memorial Library91%

Jump Credit balances for customers who switch to sponsored plans

A few partners have raised questions this week about what happens to customers’ credit balances when they switch to a sponsored plan like Ciena.

Jump customers will be used to seeing the credit balance on their dashboard when they sign into Jump. However, when they move to a sponsored plan like Ciena this balance disappears from their dashboard. The Skinny Jump team has acknowledged that this shouldn’t happen and have some work in progress to get this re-instated.

The good news is that balances on customer accounts will remain for 12 months after their last plan renewal. However, for customers on multi-year sponsored plans who can not renew a data plan, this can be a problem, as they will eventually lose any credit balance.

Customers in this situation should contact the Skinny Care Team on 0800 475 4669 within 12 months to arrange a refund.

On track for the Ciena target!

Just over a month ago, Tawera from the Skinny Jump team, issued a Ciena challenge. Total sign ups were sitting around 400 and Tawera suggested if we could boost the sign up rate to 100 per month, we would achieve the target number of signups (700) by the end of October.

Today, we reached the 500 mark and it’s not even the end of August yet. And special congratulations to the leaderboard front runners below. What a simply magnificent effort from Lorna Blackler and her team at Linwood – a well-deserved box of chocolate fish heading your way!

Total Ciena Partners = 51502
Total Issues
Linwood Library7415%
Shirley Library469%
Ranui Library459%
Hastings War Memorial Library408%
Hornby Library326%
Wairoa Library286%
Manukau Library204%
Otara Library204%
New Brighton Library184%
Te Takere Levin173%
Kaikohe Library143%
Manurewa Library143%
Onehunga Library112%
Porirua Library112%
Glenfield Library92%
Mangakino Central Charitable Trust82%
Rotorua Library82%

Ciena Signups – Which Name?

Some Ciena Jump partners have asked about which name to use in the Jump Profile form – the student’s name or the parent/caregiver?

The general principle is that Jump account holders (whether modems are provisioned for special plans like Ciena or not) should be the people who have responsibility for the account. In the case of standard Jump, this is the person who is responsible for topping up the account. This is normally an adult.

For special plans like Ciena, the person identified on the Jump Profile form should be the parent or caregiver. So while, there is no need to top up the account, any communications about the programme should go to a responsible adult.

The first communication is an email notification when the account has been provisioned for Ciena (generally a couple of days after signing up) and further emails will be sent towards the end of the year explaining options when the current programme ends.

Managing your Jump Waiting Lists

Thank you to Jump partners who are using the Waiting List process as described in my blog post from August 2022. For the most part this seems to be working very well, although we are aware that some partners have their own processes for doing this.

The benefit of using my suggested process is that we can take into account people on your Waitlist when sending you new supplies. Our objective is to try and keep you stocked with Jump modems so that you never run out. But we can’t do this if we don’t know how big your waitlist is.

We currently have modem orders in the pipeline for over 150 partners and this means that there can be a delay of up to 2 months before new supplies arrive. We are continuing to give priority to Ciena partners and partners with waiting lists recorded in their GDoc registers.

There are currently around 500 people on the Jump waitlists – and these are just the ones we know about. As modems are issued and we receive completed Profile Forms, we add the customer to your GDoc and remove them from your waitlist. This works most of the time, but we would appreciate your assistance in keeping your waitlists ‘real’.

For example, some people have been on a waitlist for over 6 months and we suspect that they might have found other options. If you know of anyone in this situation, please delete their names from your Wait List.

The Auckland Library team has come up with a good process for managing their waitlists: when they receive a new supply of modems, they notify customers on the waitlist that they have 2 weeks to arrange a time to collect a modem. Anyone who does not respond within 2 weeks is removed from the waitlist and the modem becomes available to issue to other customers.

One final point about the waitlists – please make sure you include the date in column E when customers are added to the waitlist, using the following date format: 9-jun-2023. Google Docs can get confused with dates in the following format 9/6/2023 – is this 9 June (NZ format) or 6 September (US format)?

Ciena Plan – programme being extended to more regions

The Skinny Jump team has agreed to expand the reach of the Ciena programme to more Jump partners. This offers Jump households with school-aged children a fully funded Jump connection for the remainder of the 2023 school year (to the end of December 2023). Nearly 200 new families in 30 different areas have taken up this offer since the pilot extension was offered in February 2023.

You can find out more information about this programme on the Skinny Jump website and by watching our partner briefing session for those participating in the pilot (just a tip if you are viewing the recording of this webinar, for best quality viewing, we suggest you use the High Definition (1080p) setting:

We are now calling for Expressions of Interest (EOI) from other Jump partners who may be interested in offering the Ciena programme to students in your local schools. We were not able to include every partner who submitted an EOI in the pilot programme; in some cases this was because of limited capacity on Spark’s 4G cell towers. If you are still interested, please complete this new EOI and we’ll check the coverage situation again.  

Please submit your EOIs no later than Friday 16 June 2023

Jump Profile Forms required for all CIENA Jump Signups

Our Ciena Jump signups are moving along steadily, so thank you everyone for your efforts.

There is possibly one area of confusion that would be good to remind everyone doing Ciena signups about.

Every Ciena signup must include a Jump Profile Form, whether a new modem is being issued or not.

We are receiving some Ciena Referral Forms without a Profile Form being completed, often for customers who already have a regular Jump modem and are just seeking the additional sponsorship. But what this means is that we can’t process the application. We rely on the Profile Form to communicate with the Skinny support team that is responsible for Ciena provisioning. Ciena applicants identified through the Profile Form are extracted and added to a Google Sheet shared with Skinny. Skinny then updates this sheet when the modem is provisioned for Ciena and we advise the customer.

It would also be helpful if you can ensure that the parent authorising the Ciena application is the same person as the one completing the Profile Form. Sometimes, we are finding it difficult to match names, especially when it is impossible to read the handwritten name on the referral form.

Special Alert for Jump Ciena Partners

We have had two Ciena customers contact us to ask why their Ciena Plan did not renew on 1 May. We escalated this to the Skinny Jump team at Spark in case this was a system glitch that could be affecting other Ciena customers.

The good news is that this isn’t a system glitch, so hopefully only two customers have been affected. The reason identified is that these two customers attempted to purchase additional data during month and when they did this, their accounts reverted to standard Skinny Jump.

The Jump team acknowledges that this could be confusing for customers and would like to remove the top-up option altogether for anyone on a sponsored plan, but this involves further software development and this could take some time.

As an immediate fix, any customer on a sponsored plan who attempts to top-up their account will now receive an error message.

This does highlight how important it is that Ciena partners carefully explain that being on a Ciena plan means they cannot top-up their accounts, as they are already receiving the maximum of 6 top-ups (210GB) each month.

We acknowledge that the User Guide and Partner Guides do not really cover this situation and this is something the Jump team is going to take a look at, but in the meantime, please make a special point of explaining this to Ciena applicants.

We will contact the two families that have raised this with us – their accounts have already been reset for the Ciena plan. Please contact us on jump@diaa.nz if any customer raises this issue with you and we can arrange for their accounts to be re-provisioned with the Ciena plan. Thank you.

Another important update for Ciena Partners

It is good to see that nearly half of the Jump Partners who are participating in the Ciena Pilot have now signed up one or more students in their area. Over 80 families with school-aged children are already benefitting.

But as partners sign up their first customers, they are discovering little challenges in remembering exactly what to do in terms of our back-end processes.

Yesterday a partner signed up their first customer and issued a new modem but then discovered the family already had a Jump modem. The family said “thank you very much for the new modem; we’ll bring the old one back”.

Unfortunately, issuing a new modem to family that already has a Jump connection creates a number of problems:

(1) Ciena modems are exactly the same as standard Jump modems; the only difference is the Jump plan (the Ciena Plan) that is applied to the customer’s account linked to the modem.

(2) We have an ongoing national shortage of modems; we do not issue replacement modems when the current one is working perfectly well and in the case of Ciena customers, this is a back-end process in terms of provisioning a new plan on the customer’s account (nothing to do with the hardware).

(3) Customers are unable to activate a replacement modem using the same email address until their old modem goes through our Modem Returns process (where the customer’s account is de-linked from the modem), and this generally takes up to 24 hours.

(4) Customers could use a different email for the replacement modem but then they would not be able to transfer any residual funds from their existing account to their new one.

So, any partner traversing this path is creating a lot of problems for their customer, when all that is needed is a new Profile Form (where the details of the existing modem are recorded) and the Ciena Referral Form. The Skinny Team then works their magic to reprovision the customer’s existing modem for the Ciena Plan. No new accounts to be set up. No new WiFi passwords needed. No modems to be returned. Simple as!