BigPond: Australia’s Worst ISP?
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| They aren’t hugging, she’s trying to strangle him for choosing BigPond. |
Even if you use just half the possible monthly bandwidth on your Telstra Broadband plan, you could end up owing Telstra almost half a million dollars! Don’t believe me? Then read on…
Telstra BigPond announced the other week that they were soon to be releasing new cable internet plans. Hardly surprising considering the only other cable internet provider in Australia offered far superior plans on every level.
The plans released however, did not include any changes on the minuscule download limits, expensive excess transfers fees or incredibly slow cap speeds. They did however, offer to upgrade the speed of users connections for a $10 fee. This shocked many users, as Telstra had previously advertised the cable download speed as unlimited.
For $79.95 at the two ISPs you would recieve the following:
Telstra: 10 Gigabytes of data before having your speed slowed.
Optus: 20 Gigabytes of data On-Peak + 40 Gigabytes of data Off-Peak before having your speed slowed.
Putting that one plan aside, where most user’s get caught using BigPond is agreeing to a cheaper contract with a very small data transfer, but expensive fees for exceeding that usage. Unlike Optus, on all but one of their plans, bigpond charges for excess usage. Optus merely slows the users speed.
Now I get to my point. On BigPond’s new plans, they advertise the maximum speed as 17mbps. Now whilst obtaining and keeping that speed is next to impossible, for the purpose of my argument let’s assume you reach what BigPond advertise the plan as having.
If you suscribe to BigPond Cable Extreme 200MB plan, for $39.95 a month, and maxed out your hypothetical download bandwidth for a month (we aren’t even uploading a thing!) at the end of the month you would owe BigPond, $853,000!
There are 2678400 seconds in a month. (60 * 60 * 24 * 31)
A connection running at 17mbps (17/8 = 2.125mBps) would therefore transfer 5691600 mB (2.125 * 2678400)
At a charge of 15 cents per megabyte, this would equate to $853,740 (5691600 * 0.15)
Time to change ISPs I think!
fillerbunny said,
February 27, 2006 at 12:53 pm
I wonder what would happen realistically if Joe Bloggs did this? Would Tel$tra persue the matter in court or just let it slide with a slap on the wrist.
That amount of non-recoverable debt could easily destroy the lives of the average Australian, I think there need’s to be a cap on their pricing to stop this.
tom said,
February 27, 2006 at 1:03 pm
This is perfect if there is someone you really, really hate…
Just install kazaa/limewire on thier pc, put a few movies in thier shared folder (ie Jenna Jamieson….) then tell it to run on startup/hidden, set all upload/download/max connections to thier highest settings
And then bam! $$$$$$$$
Smenkhare said,
February 27, 2006 at 1:06 pm
Fillerbunny:
They would persue it.
and it wouldn’t be the first time.
Owen said,
February 27, 2006 at 7:49 pm
Don’t forget, Optus also don’t count uploads into your usage. ;-]
holdenkicks said,
February 27, 2006 at 9:48 pm
Um people, this $800,000+ figure is a bit silly. Even if we take the max theoretical limit and cut that in half even if you downloaded and that rate 24/7 for a month, you would download over 2.8 terabytes of data!!! What average joe has 2.8 terabytes of Hard drive space to store said downloads!! And even if you had say 500gb of space, you would have to be constantly deleting your downloads…. before you even had time to view/use whatever informations or files you download!
It would still be virtually impossible to reach even a quarter of the downloads that this article calculates as a theoretical maximum. Say if you were on average downloading at a much more likely 1.5Mbps, 24/7 (which is unlikely as the HDD space would sill be an issue for most, especially avergae joes with average PC’s) then that would cost $75, 330, which is still BIG bucks but nothing like what this article says.
johnsee said,
February 27, 2006 at 10:20 pm
As I state several times it is probably not possible to reach 17mbps. One would assume speeds of approximetly 10mbps should be able to be achieved fairly easily!
That aside, you don’t have to be downloading and storing to do that. Internet radio, streaming video… there are plenty of things that don’t require storage to use bandwidth.
Bob said,
February 28, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Bigpond are just greedy @#$*’s anyway!!!
Hans said,
February 28, 2006 at 7:53 pm
I think 17mbps is also an average maximum calculated from the trial tests carried out in the months leading up to the new plans.
As is the 8mpbs which is advertised for the non-extreme plans.
I can easily reach speeds of 17mbps and even faster with 12 simultaneous connections to a premium usenet server in the US.
I can download more or less contantly at about 2.4 - 2.5 megabytes per second (20mbps), which is double that of the previously avaliable 10mbps.
At this rate you’d end up owing Telstra just over $1,000,000 dollars for your ~6.4terabytes of data.
dan said,
February 28, 2006 at 8:57 pm
owen… you you do have an upload limit on optus, it is double that of the download limit (e.g. im on the now redundant optus 12GB plan(i dont know why the hell they changed it)and it says “you have uploaded 6,853 megabytes of data” and shows a status bar with a 24 at the end.
SOL said,
February 28, 2006 at 8:57 pm
I urge you all dump big pond now
Dan said,
March 15, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Im on optus as well and ive got 3 bars 1 being my 12Gb monthly alotment
2 being my bonus off peak data alotment IE 24Gb, and 3rd being what percentage of the month you have gone through i thinnk you my of misred the graph
Fred said,
September 1, 2006 at 9:01 pm
Now what’s wrong in this country, can someone explain please ???
I just flew in from the Netherlands and took a telstra 1500/256 connection with a 500 MB cap, because the unlimited is a bit pricy.
I used it in 2 days, because I use VOIP. What a load off crap here.
In Holland I had a 12Mb connection (really unlimited) for 49 $ a month.
I voip and download the necessairy Dvd’s, about 20 a day.
How can we push Telstra ??? Maybe we should all quit !!
usenext, alphaload, firstload, firstload de, usnext, use next said,
October 23, 2007 at 8:20 am
usenext, alphaload, firstload, firstload de, usnext, use next
As you are surfing for firstload web sites and material, be sure to utilize all of the resources available.
propecia said,
December 1, 2007 at 8:13 am
discount propecia
probability unpointed
Ricky said,
January 8, 2008 at 10:20 pm
I got hit by them,
My friend set up the plan and he doesn’t live here anymore, I downloaded around 10gig of stuff from torrents over the month and the limit is 25GB, of course the uploads from the torrents doubled this and then it went into over time, 15 cents per meg,
My upcoming bill is 3000 dollars……. on an 80 dollar per month plan…….
It’s absolute highway robbery,
I used to use Optus and their plan was awesome, never had a problem only reason I changed was they wanted to charge me 200 dollars to disconnect at the old place and also 30 bucks a month because you have to have a phone line as well as internet…
They’re all a joke if you ask me but right now I’m just worried about the 3000 dollars I owe to a bunch of crooks.
Chris said,
January 15, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I too have been hit.
Though it would be my fault mostly. My dad changed plan from a slow down to a charge for passing the limit. (didnt know this, i thought it would just slow down).
%80 limit warning came, still thought it would just slow down.
15 Gig and $2321 later……..
I will be mowing the front lawn for free for a very very long time.
stevo said,
May 19, 2008 at 4:04 pm
bigpond is a f#@ing ripoff i have a 1500/256 25gig plan 4 24mths locked in and i can never get more than 150kbps using u torrent. 2 top it of when slowed i only get 7-9 kbps f#@ing bullsh#t. plus all uploads count towards my monthly usage anyone considering bigpond go elsewere there is no way im going to pay 0.15c per mb on there other plans maybe 15c 4 500mb but that will never happen bigpond can go to hell cant wait till my contract runs out.