[TelstraClear] How was your TelstraClear performance during free data weekend

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#553908 5-Dec-2011 10:18

sbiddle:
geek4me:
With more and more Internet download plans overseas no longer capped that is the way of the future.

That's not an entirely correct comment. While many countries do have upcapped plans, the US for example is moving towards caps, with most of the big ISP's such as Comcast and AT&T all having abandoned uncapped plans in the past year and all moved to caps, typically of 150 - 250GB.

In the US I suggest that has more to do with media companies who are also ISP's trying to prevent services like Netflix and Hulu hurting their legacy pay TV businesses. Also general lack of competition. I don't buy that the economics of providing an un-metered service has changed as much as they claim over there when they mostly consume domestic content and there is so much existing fibre.

In Singapore ISP's manage to run un-metered plans and the trend in Australia is towards larger and larger caps now commonly 200GB+.

Slingshot has actually managed to run a semi decent un-metered service abet un-cached international is slower than other ISP's but they have preserved low latency,

Snap has run two mostly trouble free un-metered weekends and have a addon that gives you un-metered nights.

At the end of Telecom's 2nd un-metered attempt (Big Time) after the tweaking the balance of price/performance was very actually good. I think the main problem was they initially released the plan at $99/month it was way too cheap for the time which was the real problem.

nzlander

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#553909 5-Dec-2011 10:19

I took a calculated risk, and after midnight, set a further 10 gig to download, at normal speeds, as I was going to download this anyway. I just took a look at my usage, and at this stage my metering did not kick back in until 8am. So pretty stoked about that so far. Of course it might come through in a little while, but at this stage my meter is saying 51mb used up to 9:31am

freitasm

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#553917 5-Dec-2011 10:33

Again, the thing to consider here is that AVERAGE usage is about 20GB/month. On a capped service, the single unmetered weekend offer is not representative of actual usage. TelstraClear made big announcements on TV, sent out emails to customers, spread the word through forum sites and social networks.

It was an abnormal utilisation of resources. It's probably not what you would see if there was an unmetered plan, where only a pool of users would be using the assigned resources, while another pool would use other resources.

PenultimateHop

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#553926 5-Dec-2011 10:49

Ragnor: In the US I suggest that has more to do with media companies who are also ISP's trying to prevent services like Netflix and Hulu hurting their legacy pay TV businesses. Also general lack of competition. I don't buy that the economics of providing an un-metered service has changed as much as they claim over there when they mostly consume domestic content and there is so much existing fibre.

Agreed on most of that. The economics have changed mostly due to investment cycles - they're having to invest much more, much more often, now. This is definitely squeezing profit margins.

Ragnor: In Singapore ISP's manage to run un-metered plans and the trend in Australia is towards larger and larger caps now commonly 200GB+.

On the Singapore aspect, the plans are traffic shaped like crazy without any transparency on what is prioritized. They are quite punitive and the overall experience even on 100Mbps plans was decidedly average - not much better than many people are reporting in this thread on their 15Mbps plans during regular (non AYCE) periods.

geekiegeek

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#553931 5-Dec-2011 11:01

Teeps:
geekiegeek: what plan would that be, the 120GB 25M plan has only just come down this week. Before that it was cheaper to pay overage.

I guess we are different, as if mine was that close I would have been on the Warpspeed account anyway and paid that little extra to get the increased speed. I can see what you mean though.

Out of interest, now the prices have come down this week, and as it will economically be better for you, will you change to 120GB 25M?

Yep, I'm moving up to 25M for a few dollars less then I pay now.

meesham

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#553934 5-Dec-2011 11:09

freitasm: Again, the thing to consider here is that AVERAGE usage is about 20GB/month. On a capped service, the single unmetered weekend offer is not representative of actual usage. TelstraClear made big announcements on TV, sent out emails to customers, spread the word through forum sites and social networks.

It was an abnormal utilisation of resources. It's probably not what you would see if there was an unmetered plan, where only a pool of users would be using the assigned resources, while another pool would use other resources.

I completely agree with this, it was a one-off event (and probably a bit of an experiment) and long term they would have to look at segmenting off any unmetered plans. High performance and uptime is pretty important to me which is why I have a backup ADSL connection (anyone whose internet connection is critical should have a backup link) but primarily use my TCL cable link and I'm not too worried about what's happened over the weekend. However if they start making this a regular occurrence without the ability for people to opt-out I'll get a second phone line and get the Telecom business plan reconnected. Having a TCL cable link is more about performance than large quotas for me.

Teeps

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#553941 5-Dec-2011 11:23

Sorry, hadn't noticed you had posted this.

Thanks for the insight. It seems that currently you do things in a way to avoid using too much data but this weekend gave you the opportunity to not have to do it in such a manual way. That makes sense and is good use of a weekend like this, and is how we should be able to use the internet. Of course with such a short period to do this in, it was at the same time as others so not quite as seamless as it would be if the data caps were unlimited permanently.

Hopefully we will be able to see higher data allowances for everyone sometime in the future, and it will probably just be a small upgrade for TelstraClear to make the network capable as usage will be spread out and not condensed into one weekend.

One thing I do know, and I am sure TelstraClear have realised is that Hataitai, and I am sure quite a few other areas are just oversubscribed. If anything has come from a weekend like this they will certainly know where they need to work on their network as once is annoying, but if they ever let this happen again it will be unforgivable.

DonGould:
Teeps:
DonGould: ...I'm chugging into my 77th Gig.

Some pretty impressive numbers here.

Actually it wasn't very impressive at all. I wasn't really trying very hard. First half of the weekend I wasn't even pushing any data.

Teeps: Can I ask you guys, was this stuff you wanted to download/upload or did you just get it because of the free data weekend? If it is stuff you wanted/needed to do, what would you have done if there wasn't a free data weekend? Would you have paid TC the overage charge above your normal data allowance?

Sure...

First up I'd like to say NOTHING WAS ILLEGAL!

I set up Debian servers more and more often, so I thought I'd just pull the DVDs. This didn't actually work as the stream rate got down to 4KBits/s so it ended up being a waste of time.

Normally I'd just use the deb archive and just pull what I need - ~2Gb per server. If I was doing it more often I'd set up an Approx server (you can google that).

I also have ~70Gb of video camera files that I thought I'd push out of town. I moved a reasonable amount but not all. I should have started that at 6pm on Friday. Normally I'd just whack it on DVD and get remote hands to put the DVD's in the remote server. So that would cost me ~$5 per back up and some time to cut DVD's. But no, at $2 a Gig, I wouldn't pay Telstra for overage. At 10c per Gig (like I can buy it in Australia) then I'd consider that.

I also thought I'd do a full VPS back up from the states. We already back up a bunch of stuff on it, but I thought I'd base line a full backup. That never made it though the whole thing. It was 21Gb. Once I have a baseline I can just pull changes, so yes, I may look at that one more seriously. We also schedule this to happen at night when there is less traffic. However, as most of our content is New Zealand for New Zealanders we're in the process of moving sites back to .nz as we get our .nz systems stable enough.

I also thought I'd pull a back up ~7Gb to base line our Wellington server. However that just wouldn't initialise at all. I suspect I was just over taxing the backup server at this end. No, I would not pay Telstra for this. We'll run the same back up set we do for .us but leave a full system back up until we put in a 'AYCE national' pipe (which is on the radar for late next year).

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DonGould

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#553996 5-Dec-2011 12:51

Teeps: Sorry, hadn't noticed you had posted this.

:) If you click the stalk button then you can get email alerts when I post crap.

Teeps: Thanks for the insight. It seems that currently you do things in a way to avoid using too much data but this weekend gave you the opportunity to not have to do it in such a manual way. That makes sense and is good use of a weekend like this, and is how we should be able to use the internet. Of course with such a short period to do this in, it was at the same time as others so not quite as seamless as it would be if the data caps were unlimited permanently.

Hopefully we will be able to see higher data allowances for everyone sometime in the future, and it will probably just be a small upgrade for TelstraClear to make the network capable as usage will be spread out and not condensed into one weekend.

One thing I do know, and I am sure TelstraClear have realised is that Hataitai, and I am sure quite a few other areas are just oversubscribed. If anything has come from a weekend like this they will certainly know where they need to work on their network as once is annoying, but if they ever let this happen again it will be unforgivable.

I think the key thing here for consumers to be aware of is that providers will do things from time to time to reposition themselves.

The number of people here who commented that they're using Telstra services to run their own business and then don't have any sort of back up path is a little alarming.

The Snap issue highlighted a really interesting point though. People really do need to understand the net better (or at least buy in some services of someone who does). If you were using Snap as your back up provider then you were also in trouble.

I follow the .au market more than I follow .nz and my observation there is that 'unlimited' never ends well. Michael Malone canned it from his AAPT customers when he bought them.

I'm all for big datacaps and a great price point but 'unlimited' never seems to end well.

It was interesting from my pov. I had the chance to test a bunch of systems out, so I did. My monitoring systems for example, give all sorts of responses they shouldn't so that will take me a while to sort out.

At the end of the day, for the pain it's caused some people, I think it will have a very positive effect on the network here and drive in some improvements at many levels.

As for Telstra, well if they want more customers they have many things they could do to deliver more value on their network but don't seem very interested in working with customers to do that. I suspect that they will go the AAPT way and we'll see Australia get sick of the brand damage and cut them loose, perhaps that the plan, I don't know.

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Check out mine - i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz - don@i.am.a.can.do.kiwi.nz

exportgoldman

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#554010 5-Dec-2011 13:12

I can't speak to the TelstraClear network, but I am on the unlimited slingshot account since it came out and yes as other people have said you do go nuts for the first few months (ie 400gb/month) but now our usage have dropped to around 80gb last time I checked and that's with 5 people living here...

Never had problems with the slingshot unlimited so I know it can be done :-)

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#554051 5-Dec-2011 14:11

The main way people can consume huge amounts of data is bit torrent. I fully support shaping P2P traffic, or connections that are encrypted that are using a huge amount of data, so it doesn't negatively impact interactive use. That's really just common sense, though actually doing it might take a bit of effort.

Riggleby

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#554157 5-Dec-2011 17:41

You can't shape BitTorrent traffic without hurting the users that use it for legitimate purposes - yes, there are some out there.

Talkiet

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#554159 5-Dec-2011 17:45

Riggleby: You can't shape BitTorrent traffic without hurting the users that use it for legitimate purposes - yes, there are some out there.

Basically I agree, but the point wasn't necessarily that P2P traffic wasn't important, or doesn't have legitimate uses - but that P2P traffic isn't typically INTERACTIVE traffic.

What's a worse user experience, browsing web pages interactively with a spotty connection, or having a torrent download take longer to finish than you might expect?

I know some people want all the speeedz on their torrentz, but most people seem to agree that interactive use is where (in an ideal world) you would least want to impact the customer experience.

Cheers N.

ps, I do NOT mean that all HTTP or HTTPS traffic should be separated and gold plated - it's perfectly possible to use HTTP/HTTPS for non-interactive download use as well... But the theory that interactive traffic degradation raises blood pressure the most seems reasonable.

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.

TelstraClear

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#554161 5-Dec-2011 17:50

Our free broadband weekend was hugely popular with our customers. We had around 200,000 taking part and we saw massive demand for content.

In anticipation of this, we had increased our international bandwidth capability and also our available bandwidth with other network providers. While our national links did not hit capacity, our international links quickly did. This was reflected in the slow speeds and congestion some customers experienced. If you were one of these, we understand your frustration, and apologise if the quality of service you received was less than anticipated

Obviously, everyone's experience is different, and depends very much on the ways in which customers use their internet. Early indications are that problems were experienced mainly - but not solely - by those accessing international websites. We are also aware of some local connectivity impacts for certain users, and are keen to get a better view of these.

Our free weekend was an innovative way of understanding how our customers use our services, and was run in response to countless requests for unmetered broadband.

Any new initiative carries with it a degree of risk - that's why the feedback you supply to us is extremely important. Once we've carried out a thorough review of the weekend, we'll share the information with you and take your views into account during future planning.

Thanks, Tim.

Teeps

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#554164 5-Dec-2011 17:57

I am sitting and taking very deep breaths before I respond to this, I could be a while!

I am not surprised it took a whole day for PR to write this very carefully worded statement though!

TelstraClear: Our free broadband weekend was hugely popular with our customers. We had around 200,000 taking part and we saw massive demand for content.

In anticipation of this, we had increased our international bandwidth capability and also our available bandwidth with other network providers. While our national links did not hit capacity, our international links quickly did. This was reflected in the slow speeds and congestion some customers experienced. If you were one of these, we understand your frustration, and apologise if the quality of service you received was less than anticipated

Obviously, everyone's experience is different, and depends very much on the ways in which customers use their internet. Early indications are that problems were experienced mainly - but not solely - by those accessing international websites. We are also aware of some local connectivity impacts for certain users, and are keen to get a better view of these.

Our free weekend was an innovative way of understanding how our customers use our services, and was run in response to countless requests for unmetered broadband.

Any new initiative carries with it a degree of risk - that's why the feedback you supply to us is extremely important. Once we've carried out a thorough review of the weekend, we'll share the information with you and take your views into account during future planning.

Thanks, Tim.

freitasm

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#554165 5-Dec-2011 17:59

Teeps: I am sitting and taking very deep breaths before I respond to this, I could be a while!

I am not surprised it took a whole day for PR to write this very carefully worded statement though!

Not so well worded... I'd have changed this bit:

TelstraClear: We are also aware of some local connectivity impacts for certain users, and are keen to get a better view of these.

to this:

"We are also aware of some local connectivity impacts for certain users, and are actively working to get a better view of these."

Other than this, all good ;)

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