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'?

[Beliskner]

Very clever. All is fair in business. High bandwidth customers costing the Telco in bandwidth get *kicked*. The sweet customers that use ADSL only to check email (uhh big attachments??) won't notice the difference, and face it in Australia you have a LOT of Joe sixpacks drinking Castlemeine XXXX (Australian beer) according to the ads anyway.

The solution is simple - switch to the other telco. The other telco if it's clever should start offering to pay the initial fee for your transfer to their service (like mortgage companies). Trouble is they'll have to charge more to allow for the hiher bandwidth customers switching to them.