thats right, and the people that want capped speeds also don't want to pay very much money for the connection but they would expect full speeds up to the capped speed 24/7 even though it would become saturated as most unlimited pipes do ...
When I was doing this in OZ years ago before ADSL came along, we used to work on user to modem ratios, for example a good ratio was 10 users for every modem you had connected. That worked with people not getting busy signals and they were all happy. If you wanted to offer unlimited then you had to do it thru a say a 1 or 2 meg satellite link into you for the dialups, But even then they used to work on 15 or 20 user to modem ratios and have Bots kincking people after a 2 hr connection so the busy signals got less.. We also had to pay for every bit of Data that came into us, A completely different kettle of Fish to now, but even so there was all the same problems with unlimited connections as there is now. The difference was it was staying connected then, now it is speeds while connected !
I think we need to forget about unlimited plans as they are clearly not sustainable in NZ and concentrate more on higher monthly limits and a low rate for overages.
cafeg: Cool, thanks for the good explanation ragnor.. So they buy pipes of bandwidth to service each access point they have or do they buy one big pipe to service everything they do in the country ?
In most cases the ISP pays Telecom wholesale for use of the adsl port in the cabinet/exchange, domestic backhaul to a handover point and handover link.
In the unbundled exchanges where other ISP's have installed ADSL gear etc some ISP's use their own gear or wholesale from Vodafone/Orcon/Callplus/Compass/Telstraclear instead of Telecom wholesale.
Then they pay whatever provider they like for transit/capacity from the handover link to their own network/servers if they don't have a lot of equipment at the handover point location.
Then many (but not Telecom or Telstra) pay for a interconnection to national peering exchanges like APE and WIX where they can exchange traffic with other ISP's that peer there.
Then they will pay for a domestic interconnection with either Telstraclear or Telecom as they don't peer at APE/WIX and have the market power/share to demand that smaller ISP's buy interconnection from them. Telecom and Telstraclear inteconnect with each other so a smaller ISP only has to interconnect with one of the other.
Then they will have an international provider of data services eg: Telecom's Global Gateway, Telstraclear/Reach, Verizon, Pacnet/Asianetcom, Vocus etc who have capacity on the southern cross cable and usually peering agreements at the other end in San Jose/LA to get to the rest of the world.
It maybe Telecom have increased (if they have, no-one seems to know for sure) the Data allowance because of the impending arrival of iSky, they must be concerned they'll be losing customers because of it?
All the ISP's refresh their plans every now and then, it was surprising Telecom didn't have new plans to offer with the GST increase as this is when a lot of businesses decided to make their changes.
In my opinion they are playing catch up to keep their plans competitive with other offerings.
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