Re: cost of 1 gig in .AU

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Daniel O'Connor" <darius () dons net au>
Date: April 14, 2009 9:14:37 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: "ip" <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:  cost of 1 gig GOOD POINT
Reply-To: darius () dons net au

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009, David Farber wrote:
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Adam Lynch <alynch () gmail com>
> Date: April 14, 2009 7:46:15 AM EDT
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: Re: [IP] Re: cost of 1 gig
>
> I'm surprised nobody is up in arms about this one, yet, but:
>
> What about all the traffic that never goes off-net- like Akamai'd
> content, and other distributed content? Customers will then be
> charged for usage that *never actually leaves TW's network*?

In Australia caps are old hat - ISPs _used_ to sell "unlimited" accounts
which they capped without disclosure. The ACCC (govt consumer watchdog)
came down heavily on this and now no ISP advertises in such a
misleading fashion.

Typically an ISP has unmetered content areas - eg mine (Internode) runs
many game servers, a rather large file mirror (many Linux distros,
FreeBSD, game patches & demos, lots of software), VoIP service,
internet radio mirrors/proxies, Steam (game distribution) mirror, TiVO
movie of the week, etc..

There are also ISPs which have on and off peak quotas, some charge for
uploads, some don't etc.. It's worth noting that outside of business
plans there are very few ISPs which charge excess, nearly all shape the
speed to ~64kbit. The one ISP which _does_ do excess for home accounts
is Telstra (the incumbent) and there are many tales of massive bills
from clueless customers.

However I think competition is a little more robust here, for ADSL at
least. You can switch between ISPs fairly easily presuming they have a
DSLAM in your exchange (or you want ADSL1 or you want to spend the
Telstra premium for ADSL2).

It _is_ more complex for the end user and you do have to be careful but
it is fairly workable.

That said I find it hard to believe a US ISP would have comparable
prices to an Australian one given the vastly differing economies of
scale, location, etc etc.. Mine charges $70/mo for naked ADSL (ie no
dial tone), that gives me 25Gb of downloads (then shaped, no excess),
unlimited uploads, a free DID number plus $10 credit for it.

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
 -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C



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