Friday, June 06

Geek

An Outbreak of Sanity

I've commented before on Australia's insanely expensive internet access. At the time I mentioned Comindico, and their unlimited usage plans.

I have a problem with unlimited usage plans. First, the ISP will certainly not have enough bandwidth to allow everyone to run at full speed all the time. Comindico appear to oversell their bandwidth 30 times; in other words, they provision 1.5Mbits of bandwidth to the Internet for every 30 1.5Mbit customers they sign up. That's not unusual, by the way. In fact, many ISPs use higher ratios.

The problem is, by promoting themselves as an all-you-can-eat network, Comindico are likely to attract the big eaters. If everyone is constantly downloading as fast as they can, everyone will get 50 kilobits per second. That's dial-up speed.

And the other problem is that if you give something away for free, people don't value it. Why curb your downloads when they don't cost you anything? It's the tragedy of the commons yet again.

Which is why I was interested to note that three ISPs - Swiftel, Optraweb and CyberLink - have now announced new plans with drastically cheaper - but not free - downloads.

The plans are almost identical, so I suspect there's some sort of resale deal going on. Quick summary:

SpeedIncluded
Downloads
Monthly
Charge
Excess
per MB
Included
Uploads
IP Address
256/642GB$450.6cUnlimitedStatic
512/1286GB$650.6cUnlimitedStatic
512/5126GB$1250.6cUnlimitedStatic
1500/25610GB$1250.6cUnlimitedStatic
256/64Unlimited$75n/aUnlimitedStatic

Yes, that's zero point six cents per megabyte. Compare that to the 14.9 cents charged by my current ISP.

Also nice to see is the 512/512 SDSL plan. At first glance, this has no real advantages for the average user. But when you think about it, ADSL forces us all into the category of consumers: with limited upload rates we're permanent second-class internet citizens. SDSL means that you can run your own web server or file sharing, and give as good as you get. In fact, these plans are perfect for hobbyists or small businesses running their own web sites, as they all include a static IP address and unlimited uploads.

So, am I going to switch? Yes. Probably yes. I'd have to give up my free night-time and weekend downloads. But I think I can cope with that; after all, Buffy's over now; no more to download. And I'm probably going to switch to the 512/512 while I'm at it. Hosting providers, who needs them?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:27 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 391 words, total size 3 kb.

1 That 512/128 plan looks a real bargain. Are they nationwide?

Posted by: Scott Wickstein at Wednesday, June 11 2003 03:17 PM (YU5MI)

2 Only WA and NSW at the moment. Plans for Victoria, I believe.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 12 2003 12:19 PM (v/Vqe)

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