Xtra how about giving us uncapped National traffic.

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Xtra how about giving us uncapped National traffic.

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#907272 3-Oct-2013 16:14

- Too many support nightmares. my nzsnaps.com site is hosted in the US, although some of it MIGHT be on a local CDN, and the redirect from nzsnaps.co.nz looks like an NZ site by URL, but isn't. Ask various ISPs how well their Steam unmetering went.

- There are significant technical issues doing it so there would be a not insignificant up front cost to develop it.

- National infrastructure isn't free. I'm not giving away any secrets pointing out that a significant portion of investment to keep up with the apparently ever doubling caps in Telecom has been on infrastructure within NZ - so yes, there are real costs in transporting traffic around the country - and in a relative sense, they are increasing at a faster rate than international costs.

- I believe the caps offered by most ISPs comfortably support almost any type of BB use. I am on a 500GB plan and despite being a voracious consumer of content, I barely ever exceed half that each month.

It's a nice idea, if you are one of the tiny percentage of people that want to send VASSSSTTTTT quantites of traffic around NZ, but there are very few of those people (especially compared to a normally distributed userbase), and the relative cost of investment in international capacity and national transport and access infrastructure isn't what it was 10 years ago.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

Zeon

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#907274 3-Oct-2013 16:15

It's hard to tell where traffic comes from as has been pointed out in this thread. A better approach is to offer faster speeds for *cheaper* destinations e.g. have different tiers of unlimited perhaps with all having full speed national and some, faster international than national. Speed could then act as an incentive for users to source content locally?

Speedtest 2019-10-14

NonprayingMantis

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#907285 3-Oct-2013 16:37

AidanS:
l43a2: orcon being a smaller ISP i doubt it will cause much of a stir tbh

I know several people who have already switched purely for the unlimited data plan. Though I also know many people that are afraid to touch them for their past reputation.

More on topic, many ISPs already offer uncapped data to services such as TVNZ Ondemand.

-Aidan.

Actually they don't. There are very few 'unmetered' services now that most of the bigger ones have switched to Akamai.

I think Slingshot claims to unmeter PLP, and VF unmeters iSky, but only for VF old customers, not customers who have transferred from TCL at this stage (could be wrong about that).
nobody unmeters TVNZ OnDemand

scuwp

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#907392 3-Oct-2013 19:20

Get a TiVo. TiVo customers are currently unmetered on Telecom :-)

Lazy is such an ugly word, I prefer to call it selective participation

Talkiet

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#907395 3-Oct-2013 19:22

scuwp: Get a TiVo. TiVo customers are currently unmetered on Telecom :-)

It would be foolish for anyone to base an ISP or plan choice on this right now.

CHeers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

1080p

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#907469 3-Oct-2013 21:04

BrutusNZ: Another thread and a recent News article (Orcon and Kim Dotcom) got me thinking about a pet peeve of mine... that is "Why we don't have uncapped National Traffic". Yes I know some of the network providers (including Xtra) allow uncapped traffic to certain social networking type websites but it seems very strange to me that they (the ISP's) generally treat National and International traffic the same. We can all appreciate there are costs for acquiring International traffic but what are the costs for National traffic, are they really the same costs? I had an account with IHUG years ago that had unlimited National traffic so the "Our infrastructure can't support it" answer is rubbish. So how about it Xtra?

What use would it be to regular users if ISPs offered free national traffic?

rugrat

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#907492 3-Oct-2013 21:50

Wade: It would be nice to have sites such as TNVZ/TV3 ondemand unmetered

Why?

Just looked at tvnz on demands data usuage and at high quality on a PC it works out between 500 megs and 600 megs an hour.

On telecoms lowest plan 30 gigs, that's just under 60 hours of viewing a month. Then about $10 to move to next plan, if that's not enough.

Prefer it the way it is, simple as possible, and no data management.

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Nate001

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#907495 3-Oct-2013 21:55

It all comes back to the same conclusion from previous discussions, why the need for so much data?
There are data packs available up to 500GB on telecom. 500GB for any typical user basically is "unlimited." If you are using more than 500GB then there must be some serious torrenting going on in your household.

Wade

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#907511 3-Oct-2013 22:21

rugrat:
Wade: It would be nice to have sites such as TNVZ/TV3 ondemand unmetered

Why?

Just looked at tvnz on demands data usuage and at high quality on a PC it works out between 500 megs and 600 megs an hour.

On telecoms lowest plan 30 gigs, that's just under 60 hours of viewing a month. Then about $10 to move to next plan, if that's not enough.

Prefer it the way it is, simple as possible, and no data management.

I can't see how it could be confusing to have 2 or 3 specific sites unmetered from a consumers perspective, not everyone likes to fix issues by chucking more money at it, as it is I pay telecom just shy of $300/month

surfisup1000

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#907561 3-Oct-2013 23:59

johnr: Try explaining to my parents or my sisters what is national traffic and what is not and how they can tell the difference

Easy---one example: you can stream all your TV in HD without going over your cap (assuming content providers take advantage of free national data).

I recall that telecom used to have servers from which you could download ex-cap. That was very popular among those in the know.

The issue I have with your statement, is that it is similar to asking whether the chicken or the egg came first.

loceff13

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#907694 4-Oct-2013 09:43

freitasm: And it's actually "Telecom". The "Xtra" brand disappeared years ago.

yet xtra is the default email domain for primary emails and sub accounts

lchiu7

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#908463 5-Oct-2013 14:44

At the risk of going slightly OT I was intrigued by a new item on TV3 the other day about Kim Dotcom talking about how we were a third world Internet wise (because of the caps) and how he wanted to fix that.

TV3 interviewed the head of InternetNZ about this statement and asked why we had caps. His reply was along the lines, it was a way for ISP's differentiate classes of packages for customers! I think that is being slightly disingenuous. The reason we have caps is because of Southern Cross and the monopoly on that connection. He did mention that Southern Cross was an issue and that when the other cables come online, that situation might improve.

I agree there must be a way for ISP's ton control bandwidth when their international costs are so high. I recall a couple of years ago with TCL had an uncapped weekend, response time went to custard completely as TCL customers downloaded as much as they could. There just wasn't enough bandwidth. For an uncapped plan to work, the international side has to have enough bandwidth and that cannot be easy to plan or purchase for the ISP's.

What I think makes better sense is rather than uncapped plans but plans with generous allowances. 250GB and 500GB seem like a good start. The VF/TCL cap of 150GB is way too small especially when they offer a 100Mbs plan that can quickly consume that amount of data. It analogous to selling you a Ferrari but charging you whenever you want to drive > 50kmh!

And caps are now coming into play in the US. One of my friends over there hit 500GB one month with lots of Netflix streaming by his family and he got warning messages from his ISP (ComCast?). In order to move to an uncapped plan he has had to shift to a business plan and cut his speed down from 50Mbs to 30Mbs. But 30Mbs is sufficient to stream Netflix in HD, probably more than one stream so I guess he can live with it.

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

Talkiet

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#908520 5-Oct-2013 17:02

The problem with people on Geekzone is they tend to think of themselves as normal users. You're not. I'm not. With very few exceptions, people on here are not even close to normal in terms of bandwidth use.

You say "150GB is way too small"... I don't see how that's even close to fair when the average use in NZ is WAYYYYYYYYYYYY less than that. It's under 50GB, in fact it's probably under 30GB still (although I haven't checked in a couple of months).

How can you say 150GB is way too small if it's 5 times the size of the average use? How are caps a real issue where many ISPs offer 500GB / 1TB caps?

Quite apart from the fact that many many years ago the Government/Commerce Commission in one of it's guises, effectively prevented Telecom from differentiating ADSL speeds and forced the industry to offer only a Fullspeed plan. With that pricing discriminator gone, caps was one of the very few ways left to discriminate on price.

I have a massive issue with anyone twisting figures to suit their own selfish agendas, or trying to imply that truly astronomical levels of use are anything close to usual, or needed for the average consumer.

Look at the damn market, there are some ISPs with uncapped options and most ISPs offer very large caps (for not silly $$$)

If small caps are an issue, change your ISP.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

lchiu7

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#908590 5-Oct-2013 19:49

If small caps are an issue, change your ISP.

Cheers - N

That's what I did, moving from TCL/VF cable to TCL VDSL.

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

sbiddle

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#908663 6-Oct-2013 04:51

lchiu7:
TV3 interviewed the head of InternetNZ about this statement and asked why we had caps. His reply was along the lines, it was a way for ISP's differentiate classes of packages for customers! I think that is being slightly disingenuous. The reason we have caps is because of Southern Cross and the monopoly on that connection. He did mention that Southern Cross was an issue and that when the other cables come online, that situation might improve.

If the Southern Cross cable is a reason for caps why are so many US providers now imposing caps?

The only reason caps exist is a way to differentiate users and products. You don't pay a flat price for electricity, petrol or find that you can walk into McDonalds anytime you want and pay $5 for all you can eat. Why should internet access be any different?

At the end of the day, no matter where in the world you are, you'll find a 80/20 rule (or similar) applies to internet usage where a small percentage of customers use the bulk of the data. Why should this not be charged on a users pays basis like most other things in this world?

At the end of the day NZ's average usage is still under 2GB per month despite there being many cost effective plans offering massive caps.

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