Having struggled along with Big Time for the past few months and having to deal with international speeds that frankly are no better than dial up, I thought rather than just moan about it I would offer some partical suggestions.

I wonder if anyone can remember back to the days of 128/256kb 'broadband' connections, at the time my broadband was with orcon and I had an offer from them to move to UBS as they said they would be able to offer a vastly superior service to the one they were reselling from telecom.

As it happened their layer 7 router and insufficient bandwidth meant that I couldn't use the internet for 2 months before finally changing providers.

I can't help thinking the same thing is happening here, telecom are providing nowhere near enough bandwidth to provide a half decent internet service, I fully agree with throttling torrents but taking 30 minutes to buffer a 3 minute video clip from an overseas site is plain unacceptable.

Just like a buffet you get the ones that eat a little, the ones that eat a lot and the ones who don't have to eat for 3 weeks afterwards, and for those of us who use only smallish amounts of data but want the ability once in a while to use a bit more bigtime is always going to be inadequate because of those that download hundreds of megabytes per month.

So what about this for an idea for Telecom, a plan offering shaped torrents (limit them to a speed of say 50kb) but otherwise full speed with drop back to say 256kb after 50gb for the same price as bigtime.

Interested to see what other ideas are out there, not for the data hogs but for the rest of us.