[TelstraClear] Management of Broadband Quotas

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272 posts

Ultimate Geek

#479560 10-Jun-2011 00:32

The "Additional Blocks" of data is the exact reason why I left.

Nothing worse than checking your cap, seeing you have 3Gb available, download 2Gb, suddenly you're 2Gb over your cap because the meter was not realtime.

Worst part is you now have 23Gb to use in 12 hours before the month rolls over!!!

Thats just encouraging piracy - Tisk tisk Telstra...

Now with vodafone naked $65 for 30Gb - best part no phone line

NonprayingMantis

6434 posts

Uber Geek

#479561 10-Jun-2011 01:00

loganjames: The "Additional Blocks" of data is the exact reason why I left.

Nothing worse than checking your cap, seeing you have 3Gb available, download 2Gb, suddenly you're 2Gb over your cap because the meter was not realtime.

Worst part is you now have 23Gb to use in 12 hours before the month rolls over!!!

Thats just encouraging piracy - Tisk tisk Telstra...

Now with vodafone naked $65 for 30Gb - best part no phone line

doesn't vodafone basically work the same way? i.e. if you go over your limit by only a little bit they hit you with another 30GB charge straight away

jtbthatsme

937 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#479565 10-Jun-2011 03:38

I use Xnet / worldexchange for naked dsl you have 2 payment choices really as they are literally you pay for what you use either at just over a $1 a gig or add approx $0.50c per gig and you get 75 gig off peak downloading a month between 2am & 8am otherwise you pay the slightly higher price.

Have been with them for a few years now and other than some speed issues (now resolved) early on in my time with them there was nothing else I could fault them on.

Vost for Naked DSL is i think $69per month and I get a free voip line with that toll calls are relatively cheap and the phone service and quality is great in my opinion.

timmmay

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Lifetime subscriber

#479592 10-Jun-2011 08:52

lchiu7: I am now looking at moving from TCL after 7 years. Does anybody have any knowledge of a decent naked DSL provider in the Wellington/Khandallah area?

I have two phone lines coming into the house, both from TCL but I could ditch the second line and put DSL on that one. Then if I liked it, I would ditch the TCL cable.

Why are you moving? TCL cable works great for me.

In your position i'd go to naked broadband and get WxC VOIP lines, you can keep your phone number.

Ragnor

8218 posts

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#479733 10-Jun-2011 14:36

lchiu7: I am now looking at moving from TCL after 7 years. Does anybody have any knowledge of a decent naked DSL provider in the Wellington/Khandallah area?

I have two phone lines coming into the house, both from TCL but I could ditch the second line and put DSL on that one. Then if I liked it, I would ditch the TCL cable.

Maxnet
Xnet
Vodafone
Orcon
Snap
Slingshot

Obviously these all have their own pro's and con's and various mix of reliability/speed/cost.

If you want the best peak time performance and don't mind paying a bit more for it, I would say try maxnet.

However Xnet and Orcon have no contract term so that may be a factor for you.

Hammerer

2476 posts

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Lifetime subscriber

#480113 11-Jun-2011 17:57

eXDee: People paying $30 for a 25gb block where only a few hundred MB gets used is easy money.

Ragnor: Telstraclear's data pack system is annoying, with 10GB or 25GB packs if you go 1 GB over you end up paying for 9GB or 24GB you didn't get to use.

loganjames: The "Additional Blocks" of data is the exact reason why I left.

Nothing worse than checking your cap, seeing you have 3Gb available, download 2Gb, suddenly you're 2Gb over your cap because the meter was not realtime.

Worst part is you now have 23Gb to use in 12 hours before the month rolls over!!!

I don't understand why people are talking about having to buy a 10GB or 25GB pack when they go over their TCL plan. This is not the case for HomePlan (ADSL), InHome (cable), BizBroadband, and BizNet which all have pack sizes between 0.5Gb and 2GB.

Perhaps they mean that they upgrade to the next plan for the month. Or is there a product that I'm not familiar with? YES, I see now that HomePlan doubles your quota if you go over. That is clearly a big negative!

I find that the additional packs work very well for me but I would like to change from TCL because of customer service issues. I'm just not prepared to downgrade from cable. Even to save $400 a year I'm not prepared to drop to ADSL/2 and VOIP.

The only problem I have with cable working so well is that our Xbox often becomes host in online games like Call of Duty thereby increasing our data usage substantially.

jtbthatsme

937 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#480126 11-Jun-2011 18:37

Of course if you upgrade or downgrade your plan with Telstra your data resets overnight giving you a whole new lot of data to use.

Do not quote me on prices but here's a example that I often used (again not real prices)

50gig price $80 you use 51 gig in 15 days they will charge a block at $2.95 which I believe is 2gig for the larger plan. You ring Telstra and say you want to upgrade to the next plan 80gig (costs $120) you get billed the last 10 days at the new rate but those last 10 days will give 80gig to use.

Over the month you would be charged as follows 50% of the 50gig plan + 50% of the 80Gig plan + the 1 $2.95 data block. You get 132 gigs worth of data for $102.95 which is a lot less $$$ for a lot more data. This obviously works if you downgrade too.

The downside of this is that you can only change your plan once in a billing period.

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Hammerer

2476 posts

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Lifetime subscriber

#480351 12-Jun-2011 16:51

Yes, changing plan works great on cable. I used to do it about 4 times a year.

I guess that those on HomePlan (ADSL) with the 25GB blocks can't upgrade in the same way because they are on the largest plan already. I'm not sure if they can downgrade to 10GB blocks.

CapBBeard

211 posts

Master Geek

#480584 13-Jun-2011 12:04

Speaking of.. I just logged in to check out our latest bill (HomePlan ADSL, 10GB packs) - 30.07GB used, argh!

Sure I probably should have been monitoring it better but as mentioned earlier it can be hard when it isn't real time. Also, the email "notifications" only seem to happen for your first usage pack.. subsequent packs dont give you the 80% & 100% usage notifications!

That 0.07GB meant an extra $15 slapped on to the bill for a largely unused 10GB pack (0.007% used =/ ).

Very frustrating! At the very least I'd like to see email notifications for *all* packs (first AND subsequent), perhaps some sort of grace value for overage, and as a bit of a pipe dream, rollover of unused data into the following month (short of a full data pack rethink).

muppet

2566 posts

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#480586 13-Jun-2011 12:11

I love the way TelstraClear does it. They email me each time I'm close to using and when I do use a pack. I don't even know where the usage meters are.

Audiophiles are such twits! They buy such pointless stuff: Gold plated cables, $2000 power cords. Idiots.

OOOHHHH HYPERFIBRE!

CapBBeard

211 posts

Master Geek

#481960 16-Jun-2011 17:29

I feel I should update my situation written 2 posts above; I've just now gone to pay the bill and it appears the actual billed usage has for some reason fallen below what was reported by the usage meter and thus I have only been billed for 3 usage packs - not the 4 I had anticipated from what the meter was telling me (30.07GB).

Whether this is some sort of miscalculation or there is in fact some kind of grace system in place I dont know, but it does seem I was a bit hasty sorry!

raytaylor

4014 posts

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#482533 18-Jun-2011 13:34

Slingshot will throttle you down when you hit your cap.
Then you go to the website and order another data block of a size of your choosing
You are then fast again until you run out.

If you dont use all your additional data blocks, it gets added to your next month's base cap.

The decision made by telstra clear is by not throttling people down, they can bill people more and make more money. The other thing is you can use quite a bit still when throttled to 64k and I believe in a pay for what you use system.

Ray Taylor

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WellingtonBoy

44 posts

Geek

#483852 21-Jun-2011 19:37

It's happened again.

I was careful to monitor my Internet usage.

I paid attention to the email from TCL about reaching 80% of my quota.

I monitored the TCL usage meter multiple times on the last day of my period, to ensure I didn't exceed my monthly quota.

And I stopped surfing well before Midnight, to avoid the hours being carried into my next cycle again, due to delayed processing.

BUT... despite taking all these precautions, the TCL Usage Meter advises that I exceeded my monthly quota (again)

Not happy.

Ragnor

8218 posts

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#483873 21-Jun-2011 19:56

Vote with your wallet and change ISP imo.

Practically every other ISP has throttle on cap as an option or a better system (data blocks, charge per GB etc).

zaptor

745 posts

Ultimate Geek

#484245 22-Jun-2011 10:46

WellingtonBoy:
I monitored the TCL usage meter multiple times on the last day of my period, to ensure I didn't exceed my monthly quota.

I set up a bridge between my router and the modem for the explicit purpose of monitoring traffic. It runs 24x7 and captures all packets on the wire between router and modem.
If I go back to TCL to dispute usage then I'll have the raw snoops to back me up.
A lot of the packets are broadcast ARP or STP, which TCL shouldn't be billing for (in terms of payload it's quite minimal anyhow).

I haven't been to the their "unmetered" website yet - but plan to. Curiously, I checked the URL for one of their video streams and it looked like a Sky server.

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