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'Throttling' Broadband Provider Sued In Australia
destinyland writes "Optus has been severely throttling users who exceed a download quota, according to ZDNet — down from 100Mbps to 64Kbps — and it's drawn attention from federal regulators. Optus's ad campaign promises 'supersonic' speeds, and one technology blog notes that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission 'isn't happy about Optus' sensationalist claims, which it's sure breaches the Trade Practices Act.' Australia's trade commission called the practice 'misleading or deceptive,' and the broadband provider now has a date in court next month, the second one since a June hearing over 'unlimited' voice and data plans that actually had usage caps."
shouldn't it be "provider" and not "provided?" the difference is subtle, yet profound...
Damn, where do I have to live to get that?
From the summary:
Optus's ad campaign promises 'supersonic' speeds
Well, I'd expect that. I wouldn't like a ping time of 6 seconds per kilometer distance!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I think the title was meant to be read "Broadband provider that throttles sued in Australia"
GENERATION 9882463: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig & add a random number to the generation.
If you don't subscribe to Optus's "premium" tiers, your service can be throttled to 28.8 Kb/s. From the Optus price list:
'yes' DSL Basic 200MB
'yes' DSL Unlimited
Yes, they really call it "unlimited", in the same table with the limits. That table isn't easy to find. You have to go through three web pages, then download several Word documents
That's their DSL service. Their cable service has similar tiers and terms, but slightly different pricing.
With all the negative press these "limited-unlimited" plans have been getting both for cell phones and internet providers, I would think that a marketable slogan might now be:
"Due to the laws of physics, we aren't unlimited, but we'll do the next best thing and make it easy for you to monitor your usage and judge how much you are spending on bandwidth!"
It would be nice to have an ISP that attains success by being honest instead of by lying to their customers.
It seems the "unlimited" thing seems like such a good sell that every ISP feels the need to offer it, even when they can't actually handle the traffic. What ever happened to not selling things you can't offer?
(The corollary of SNL's "Don't Buy Things You Can't Afford.")
I just looked up their plans. They have multiple tiers, but the AUS$60 plan allows 120GB prior to being throttled
You can buy upto 200GB if you are a heavy user (with 256k throttle when exceeded). That's still 1/3rd my full speed CATV plan and not that bad.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It wasn't advertised as such. They advertise you get 120GB for the cheapest plan and 200GB for the highest plan.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Comcast has throttled any P2P traffic - regardless of your plan - into the ground. The FCC has told them numerous times to stop, they told the FCC to fuck off. Numerous times.
But hey - things can play out different in Oz right? Whatever keeps those delusion flags flying is fine by me.
If the customers desires more than 250 GB, then let him buy more from his Aussie provider.
If that Aussie provider doesn't want to end up in court, let him advertise what he's actually offering. This isn't about the quality of service, it's about their quality of ethics.
I live in the U.S., and it's stories like this that make me feel better when I read other stories about countries where you can buy gigabit services for thirty bucks a month. Of course, one has to wonder whether those services are sold under similar misleading terms. I wouldn't know.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So their other plans not called unlimited are limited time, are they?
In germany there's an ISP called kabeldeutschland that claims 100mbit down 6mbit up (its cable + fiber behind).
Except from 6pm to 8am you get less than 1Mbit up/down on every protocol except HTTP. Everyday, no matter how much you downloaded or not (there's no download cap actually).
Quite sucky and probably borderline legal. They documents only say "up to" of course with no mention of the enforced 100k/s limit depending on the time of the day.
Their marketing material however, compares their 100mbit versus the 16Mbit of traditional DSL like the best thing since sliced bread. Except the traditional DSL provides 16Mbit on every protocol internet supports regardless of the time of the day, and is therefore much better. (and cheaper!)
That is not correct. The service is actually adretised as '1 Mbit/s' or '10 Mbit/s' service and in such case it is reasonable to expect that I should be able to get what I paid for - such as 1 Mbit per second for the whole duration of the contract (and the 128 Kbit upload too).
Your numbers are out of date, and here's the latest from that website
Mbit/s
11 US/Russian Federation (tie)
10 E.U.
9 Canada
8 Australia
7 China
4 Brazil
3 Mexico
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
If you paid for 250 GB (for example) and you hit that limit, I think the companies have every right to cut your off completely, just the same as my calling card or cellphone "cut me off" when I run out of minutes.
People need to stop being petty when they moderate. He has a valid point. Currently Comcast is doing the same thing except they are'nt offering unlimited service (I think their current bit is "the fastest fast"). I'm pretty sure some other ISP's are doing the same thing as they don't want any scrutiny from the FCC. The comment is valid, if they make the limits clear they the ISP is well within their rights to either ask you to pay up or disable your service till the next month. Modded up +2 under rated.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
What's this 'unlimited time' crap?
I had cable service back around 1999 and used a NetWare server as a firewall, mostly to play around with filtering ads. Since I had it on 24x7, when the cable company ran a contest and gave a t-shirt to the user with the most hours online, I won. No problem.
The second month, they gave me another t-shirt, and then asked me if I would mind if they gave a third t-shirt to some other user... Well, I said no problem.
Third month, I'm the #1 user again, and the marketing department said they had to give me the shirt or there would be trouble. That's when they asked me what I was doing online.
I told them. They were quite upset, and tried to cut my service off for some BS terms-of-service violation. I threatened to complain to the city and the state, and called their bluff. They relented, but I asked them to stop sending cheezy t-shirts. They gave up on the contest, since I only won the third time because another player/user had some downtime. I found out he was running NTAS, of course. That explains the downtime.
But despite being 'online' for 720-744 hours a month, I wasn't downloading much at all. They had a contest for that too. I ran a chron job on my firewall just to annoy them. Won that too. Novell's FTP site was also crazy fast, and they didn't notice I was downloading it a few times a day. This would not work today.
All of this to make a point. 'Time' doesn't mean anything for online usage. Many people leave their PC on all the time, and it's talking at least a little bit always. Sounds like this ISP is just weaseling the true cap, bytes, and trying not to tell anyone. Complete and utter crap. They should pay up. Pure corporate weaselry.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Take a look at the plans by Comcen, a smaller ISP that I'm with. Their new ADSL2+ plans throttle off-peak bandwidth down to 2Mbps all the time, even if you haven't exceeded your quota!
See the plans here. Click a plan to get more information, where it will say "Off-Peak Speed: Speed is slowed to 2000Kbps (2Mbps) during off-peak only". All but one of the plans has a permanent throttle on night-time bandwidth.
What if you're a professional who wants to sync or back-up data to your work at night? What if you're a techo like me doing after-hours remote maintenance over a VPN? If you're with this ISP, you won't get a choice, you'll be throttled, even if your physical link can do over ten megabits!
I'm going to clarify what the word "unlimited" means in this context (regardless of how it's complete bullshit).
On an "unlimited" plan, you get for example 50 gig. This 50 gig is at the maximum (theoretically) speed allowed by that plan by the ISP. Should you exceed that 50gig, your speed gets throttled down (or "shaped" to use the weasel word). You still can use your connection to do whatever you want, and for no extra charge, it's just that it's practically near impossible to actually do so when your speeds are cut to nearly nothing. They claim it is "shaped" to dialup speeds of 64kbps, but at least on my plan that is never really the case and I'm lucky to get 15.
That's what unlimited means, theoretically infinite amounts of data, but only 50gigs of that is at the speeds associated with how fast the technology allows. Nothing to do with time or anything like that.
Where optus has run into problems is not with the term "unlimited", it's a pretty common term thrown about by ISPs in Australia. The only problem they ran into is by claiming the speeds are "supersonic" indicating they're superfast, when, if you're throttled, they're nothing of the kind. That's it, that's the entire story.