growler_south | (no subject)

(no subject)

Our lovely ISP, Telecom, are retiring their traffic-shaped all you can eat plan. The official word is that too many people were complaining about the traffic management, which isn't surprising given the low IQ of the general populace. Look, people, it's unlimited because they can slow you down if you download too much. Dont complain if you get slowed down, just move to a plan that isnt traffic managed!

In any case, we're about to be moved to Telecom's next best offering for high bandwidth users: 40GB/month for $79.95 and $20/GB for additional data. Which means, at our current use of 300GB/month, our bill will go from $59.95 to $5279.95 a month.

Unsurprisingly, we're unlikely to be staying with Telecom. Other ISPs charge $2/GB, which is still outrageous but bearable.

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You can get better than $2/GB. Slingshot charge $1/GB if you buy in 50GB chunks, which are carried over from month to month. And they don't count traffic 1AM-7Am. I don't think they're the only ones.

I can understand tiered pricing for wireless data; spectrum is a limiting factor. There's no such limit on wired connectivity - DSL, cable, whatever. That approach just effing reeks.

Uh, but there is a limiting factor for wired data: The teensy wire connecting New Zealand to the USA - where most of the data is.

Look up Southern Cross Cable in Wikipedia. 50% owned by Telecom NZ. 18,000 miles of fiber. Cost something like a billion dollars.

Maybe someday there will be a competing cable system... but there isn't yet. So ISPs *all* pay by usage for that cable, and pass on the expense.

The one weird thing is that they charge the same for data traffic that's local to NZ. That may be just because it's hard to explain to users why some bits cost more than others.

The one weird thing is that they charge the same for data traffic that's local to NZ. That may be just because it's hard to explain to users why some bits cost more than others.
Used to be done that way some years back, but gradually the ISPs gave up on it. I think a large part of the reason is that it's hard to look at an address and say for sure whether it's in NZ or not without a human giving it the once over.

Oof - hadn't considered that. Myopic bear is embarrassed. I guess I just figured they'd work out their average usage and build it into their monthly rates.

I don't know that it would be hard to explain if the system's set up right - I know Telstra/BigPond in Australia does something similar, perhaps even for a similar reason. Certain sites are tagged as "Unmetered" and people can use them all they like without impacting their data transfer cap. Not exactly the same thing - but surely a NZ ISP could target popular local-to-NZ sites (say, anything and everything to do with the government, libraries, etc., and anything with a .co.nz domain name perhaps) and exempt those from the data cap. That might not help you guys too much - I have no idea what your traffic consists of - but it would be good public relations, at least.

It's also my impression that IP blocks are to some degree assigned by country - that's how the BBC prevents people from other countries from using iPlayer, and Hulu blocks anyone not in the USA. Seems like it should be possible to use that info here. Of course, that leaves the question of why they'd want to make less money... *sigh*

OMG could this mean a return to analog porn?

Let's not be ridiculous.

Though if my data were capped, I might be more picky what I download. Buckback Mountain was amusing, but not wank material.

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