As yet another rat soon to be leaving their leaky vessel, I just wanted to register and post here to warn others of what's really on sale here.


Even when downloading Linux updates from a fast NZ server I only get 100KB/s. International bandwidth is never over 40KBs, and New Zealand is hardly the beating heart of the internet... If they advertised their expected data speeds to unsubscribed customers (I got a figure of 40KBs from their excellent [no sarcasm] customer support line), of course no one would sign up.


This is of course ridiculous; hey, why not offer 100 gigs, 1000 gigs or even 100000000000 exabytes per month?


Let's crunch the numbers quickly:


75GB = 75 * 1024 * 1024 KB = 78643200KB


Now let's say you have a nice low-power machine (remember the power bill) doing resumable downloads from 2am to 8am (6 hours) every night in a 30 day month. Of course everyone knows that all content on the internet is nicely resumable, always available, and we're never in a hurry to transfer anything (like say, a 10mb PDF document)... anyway, supposing this is the case,


30 days of 6 hours = 30 * 6 * 60 * 60 = 648000 seconds


so that means you'd need to be downloading nonstop at 121.363 KBs to actually derive throughput benefit from this package. I stress throughput benefit, because daytime speeds are ridiculously slow too (even South African internet users will laugh), so you're certainly not getting any speed benefits.


And that's why you shouldn't support this pathetic (dis)service.