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Charging for Cable Internet Access in Australia

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the spend-the-money dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "Australian Cable Internet users suffered another major drawback yesterday, with simple services such as E-mail and Newsgroups being charged on a per megabyte basis. This practise is ludicrous as a client can now be charged for spam. Previously, traffic from one cable modem to another was free, yet Telstra have amended their terms and conditions without user consent to include cable modem traffic. In fact, any traffic will be now charged on a per megabyte basis. So angry is the cable community, that it has made headines in Australian news. "

1 of 337 comments (clear)

  1. Paying for DoS by h2so4 · · Score: 5

    I'm at university in the UK, and I can sympathise with the problems this can cause... For 100 ukp we get a permenent ethernet connection in our room, which is very tasty.

    However there is a drawback. Because universities in the UK are now charged for their transatlantic bandwidth, the charges get passed down to us, on a per MB basis: each quarter, you get 5 ukp worth of credit; transfers are about 2 pence per MB.

    During November, some loser decided he would smurf me though, didn't he....using American broadcast IP's. As I had a static IP, this was an inconvenience to say the least... The result: 25 ukp worth of ICMP charging! But kernel loggin on ICMP comes in handy when you have to show your sysadmin proof...even if it did mean being assigned an IP.


    Making the "victim" pay for being DoS'd is a major flaw, which if protocols become metered, is going to become a major problem to the internet on which we work.