C13BennettRing 

Consensus IT Writers Awards

In last month's hardware reviews intro, I stated that Telstra's BigPond ADSL service was back up to acceptable performance levels, and even went as far as to whole heartedly recommend it for those who wanted a broadband connection but couldn't get access to cable. Mere days after writing this piece came the shocking news that Telstra was to implement a 3GB cap on both its 'unlimited' cable and ADSL accounts.

When I first heard this news, I have to admit I wasn't particularly phased. Three gigabytes of data should be more than enough for my meagre needs. . . or so I thought. Soon after announcing the new Acceptable Use Policy, Telstra had its usage meter online, so I headed over to see how far below 3GB I had used in the previous month. Lo and behold, 2.5GB of ones and zeroes had been delivered to my PC courtesy of the ADSL postman in the previous month. And I thought I'd had a quiet month in terms of Internet use!

I use the Net for around four hours each night, with an additional 15 or so hours of use on the weekend. I rarely, if ever, download anything of considerable size, but I do play a lot of online games, as well as stream both radio and Webcasts over the Net. I'd class myself as a medium user of the Net, but definitely not a heavy user (unlike when I was a student and had lots of spare time!). So how the hell did I manage to chew through 2.5GB of bandwidth?

Let's look at online gaming first. Tribes 2 is my current online favourite, and it uses approximately 5KB per second when using the highest quality voice codec. At this speed, it chews through roughly 300KB per minute. So if I play for four hours every day, each day I'll be using around 72MB of data. Multiply that by 30 days to get the monthly usage, and it turns out that I end up using just over 2GB of bandwidth per month solely for gaming. Considering that many people now prefer to play online games than watch TV, and we can see that my four hours per day could be quite low compared to many.

So all I've done is play some games and I'm already two thirds of the way through my monthly allowance. Now, suppose I also like to download a few demos or movies throughout each month as well. The average game demo now weighs in at around 100-150MB, so I can only download around six or seven new demos each month. This leaves me with no more bandwidth for Web browsing, emailing or streaming media off the net.

Speaking of streaming media, it was one of the uses of broadband that Telstra was so heavily pushing in its advertising when I signed up for my 'unlimited' account - and it is one of the heaviest uses of bandwidth. It's not unusual to stream a webcast at over 20KB/s and if I were to do this for a full 24 hours, I would easily exceed 1.5GB of data in one day! In fact, if I were to download at the maximum speed my 512KB/s ADSL connection allows for a full day, I would use the entire 3GB limit within the space of 24 hours! 

So what can we do about this? Not a lot, it seems. Already there are several online petitions, and the amount of protest even saw the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman getting involved. Unfortunately, the TIO is now saying that it is within Telstra's rights to make these changes to its AUP. One Website in particular, www.sitehappens.com.au, is collecting donations towards a full page protest advertisement in The Australian newspaper (who kindly offered a 30% discount to the organisers). $13, 000 had been collected the day I sat down to write this - obviously a large number of unhappy Telstra users willing to pay for action. 

The only other option is to disconnect from the Telstra network. It must be noted that Telstra has offered to disconnect users who aren't content with the limit without charging them the usual disconnection fee. But there has been no mention of reimbursing people for the several hundred dollar installation fees that both cable and ADSL involve. And for people who don't have any other broadband options (the majority of Australians), going back to dial up is going to be a painful process after the speeds offered by cable and ADSL. 

Personally, I'm going to stick with my BigPond ADSL, because it's the only broadband option I have. If I do start breaching the 3GB cap, it will be time to head back to the trusty old 56K modem. But don't mistake me, I'm not happy that Telstra has introduced this cap which negates many of the benefits of broadband that I signed up for in the first place. 

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