Death of Decent Australian Broadband

iamplasma writes: "As reported by several Australian newspapers, Optus cable internet services will be switching their standard plan to a 3gb "soft-limit" broadband service (once the limit is passed, the service slows to 28kbps). This is effectively the end of decent broadband in Australia, with Optus being the only major provider to offer a service without a highly restrictive usage cap. This is also the ISP who proudly promoted themselves over their main competitor specifically over the issue of the competitor's 3gb limits."

Comments

Re:Perhaps broadband should charge 'per megabyte'?

[bleh-of-the-huns]

Perhaps it's time for ISPs to charge per megabyte? There's no such thing as 'unlimited' or 'free'

This may apply for ISP's outside the US getting service from major backbone providers of which most if not all are based in the US, and are charged by the amount of data they use.

However inside the US, ISP's pretty much pay flat fees from backbone providers, and in alot of cases, ISPs have peering agreements with each other, so source and destination traffic stays within the respective source and destination networks.

However once you have to cross the ocean, your being charge by the amount of data (whether undersea lines or satellite). The problem is, the US providers don't bear any of the costs, whether its someone in the US sending data to an ISP outside the US, or that ISP sending data to the US, that ISP bears ALL the costs

Prices

[Ambush]

Here's the new pricing plans;

1. 550Mb/Month $AU64.95

2. 3Gb/Month $AU79.95

3. 5Gb/Month $AU164.95

4. 10Gb/Month $AU305.95

The average user, according to Optus, uses around 65Mb per day (or almost 2Gb/Month). The 3Gb plan could therefore be construed as offering 50% more than the current average usage.

For comparison, the plan I am currently on is $AU74.95/Month (incl GST) for up to ten times the average monthly usage, or 19.5Gb.

So, time to start hunting for alternatives. Oh, and ways to monitor my usage.

Re:Perhaps broadband should charge 'per megabyte'?

[newt]

In the US, T1's are used by businesses; In Australia, most businesses use ISDN (yes, 128kbits/sec), or if they need a "fast" connection they'll usually pick one of the Telstra "DDS Fastway" offerings (leased-lines provided as a managed end-to-end data service at committed datarates between 64kbps and 2 Mbps). There's an increasing amount of ADSL used for business connections too.

In the wholesale marketplace, ISPs have tended to use Telstra Megalink for 2 Mbps services (basically E1 on G.703), but that's increasingly being replaced by 100 Mbps Ethernet as next-generation carriers lay more fibre around the place.

Yes, you'd be right in thinking that all these connectivity options are very Telstra-centric. They're the monopology carrier in our, ahem, "competitive" telecommunications marketplace. It sucks, but it's one of the industry conditions which we just have to cope with, and it's one of the single largest reasons for the high cents/Mbyte figure you see quoted by retail ISPs in Australia. Just to give you some starting points, a Telstra Megalink in the 6km distance band costs $3000 to install and $800 per month to run. 64k on ISDN costs about $400 per month (if you've told Telstra which number you'll be dialling in advance - if you dial any other number, it's about $1800 per month in the local call charging band).

- mark
Network Engineer, Internode