A full-on price war - or at least a data cap war - has broken out between ISPs.

While Telecom celebrated its rebranding campaign, round 5000 homes and businesses in east Auckland spent most of Monday without broadband early morning to 8pm in the evening.

“There was a fibre optic cable damaged this morning about 2km from Otara, which meant about 5000 customers around that area have lost DSL broadband,” said Telecom spokesman Ian Bonnar late yesterday afternoon.

DSL runs over old copper phone lines, which in turn feed into Telecom's fibre network.

TelstraClear has launched a series of fixed-line broadband plans based on VDSL2 technology, a souped-up version of DSL that can hit up to 30Mbit/s download, and 7Mbit/s upload – making it the fastest copper line internet option in the country.

While Vodafone and Orcon have been publicising their own VDSL2 trials for months, TelstraClear, which kept its own build largely under wraps, has beaten them to the punch to become the first to commercially offer the technology in New Zealand.