Aussie ISP customers get huge data cap boost

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310 posts

Ultimate Geek

#489883 6-Jul-2011 00:09

I'm changing to a capped plan!

Ragnor

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#490040 6-Jul-2011 13:35

sbiddle: Don't get too excited.

The good news is bragging about it will mean any exploits Telecom's system may have are guaranteed to be closed. Don't believe me? Just look at all the other people who have decided to post on here in the past bragging about bypasing throttling and metering systems!

I think you mean "will eventually get fixed possibly in the next 2-5 years" because that's how long it seems to take Telecom to fix these issues. Refer to previous examples such as: Tivo customers getting completely un-metered data instead of just unmetered tivo downloads and pro rata'd plan changes mid month where usage gets reset to 0 meaning you could get 80GB for the price of 40GB etc.

Those were incidentally fixed but years after they were well known.

It's fairly clear Telecom's usage metering and billing systems are not the greatest.

They have a tendency to go down more than Jenna Jameson and are noway near "near real time" which many other ISP's do manage to achieve.

Beccara

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#490041 6-Jul-2011 13:37

I think it would be a case of the cost of Fixing It costs more than the cost of a few users abusing it. I would say widespread abuse of these loopholes would result in them getting fixed alot quicker

Most problems are the result of previous solutions...

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NonprayingMantis

6434 posts

Uber Geek

#490049 6-Jul-2011 13:53

it woudl dependon the fix too. some things (like the TiVo thing) are clearly quite complex to fix. Other things might involves 20 minutes work. So you never really know what is going to happen if you post it here....

jonb

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#490060 6-Jul-2011 14:04

Maybe it's also a business decision not to fix too these issues urgently. I wouldn't sign up with Telstra for broadband due to how they aggresively penalise customers who go a little over their cap, but when VF and telecom have equivalent plans but with a lag between going over limit and the cap being applied, I know who'd I'd choose.

PaulBrislen

198 posts

Master Geek

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#490070 6-Jul-2011 14:15

Southern Cross Cables says they charge NZ ISPs the same rate they charge Australian ISPs for international data.

If that's the case, why do our ISPs blame SCC for the cost of international bandwidth?

Are we being sold a lemon? Or is there a real reason why the caps are so low here?

Beccara

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#490081 6-Jul-2011 14:38

Because you have to blame someone? Can't just accept it as a population density/uptake issue and leave the matter alone

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PaulBrislen

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#490083 6-Jul-2011 14:42

But they're saying there is no population density/uptake issue - our ISPs pay the same.

So what's the real problem?

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#490091 6-Jul-2011 15:09

PaulBrislen: But they're saying there is no population density/uptake issue - our ISPs pay the same.

So what's the real problem?

Hand over capping would be the first really obvious one.

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techmeister

310 posts

Ultimate Geek

#490093 6-Jul-2011 15:11

Maybe their not telling the truth.
The Aussies have more cables I suppose, so must be more competition so lower prices?

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#490103 6-Jul-2011 15:21

PaulBrislen: Southern Cross Cables says they charge NZ ISPs the same rate they charge Australian ISPs for international data.

When you say they're charging the same... is that per mb at a flat rate or per mb on volume?

.nz you pay $10/m if you buy 100mbit...
.au you pay $10/m if you buy 100mbit...
.nz you pay $8/m if you buy 200mbit...
.au you pay $8/m if you buy 200mbit...
.nz you pay $6/m if you buy 300mbit...
.au you pay $6/m if you buy 300mbit...
.nz you pay $4/m if you buy 400mbit...
.au you pay $4/m if you buy 400mbit...

Which makes Pauls statement right....

But are all .nz providers only able to by 30mbit and paying the $40 price while .au providers can get 5gbit and pay .2/mbit?

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Beccara

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#490105 6-Jul-2011 15:22

PaulBrislen: But they're saying there is no population density/uptake issue - our ISPs pay the same.

So what's the real problem?

I think our ISP's pay the same for the same amount of bandwidth, For examples sake if NZ's biggest ISP only buys 10gbit but AU's biggest ISP buys 50gbit due to population size/uptake differences then yeah the AU ISP will get cheaper and thus be able to allocate more bandwidth per client than NZ.

Ragnor

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#490214 6-Jul-2011 19:17

PaulBrislen: Or is there a real reason why the caps are so low here?

The decision to sell/privatise "Telecom" in the 1980's as one unit instead of splitting the company and breaking the vertically integrated monopoly (which they did plan to do at first till they got a big offer for the whole unit) was a massive mistake and everything flows from there.

High International Bandwidth Costs

Most ISP's don't have the scale to buy direct from SXC because SXC only sell minimum STM-16 on something like 20 year contract (sorry can't remember the exact amounts) but the cost is high (relative to the size of our ISP's).

All NZ ISP's in practice buy from resllers at higher per Mbit price than buying direct from SXC but in smaller total Mbit quanity than SXC offers directly.

The resellers are: Vocus, Asianetcom/Pacnet, Global Gateway (Telecom), Reach (Telstra), Odyssey Networks (Orcon) and Verizon.. there might be a few more now I haven't kept up to date.

High Domestic Bandwidth Costs

Several years ago now Telecom and Telstraclear stopped openly peering at APE and WIX.

They signed an interconnection agreement with each other then thus effectively proceeded to use their joint market power to force every other ISP, hosting providers and content providers to need to purchase interconnection with one of them in addition to paying for their domestic transit to peering exchanges.

High Access Costs

Chorus have ~$2 billion in assets and made $500 million profit in 2010, that's 28% ROI, it smells like supernormal profits due to monopoly rent.

If you look at the cost of a Telecom Retail Total Home Broadband 40GB plan which is ~$100 for ubran around half of the cost of that $40-50ish is in fact the cost of the line rental, dsl service, backhaul and handover which goes to Telecom Wholesale and thus Chorus.

LLU has failed to have a meaningful effect due to cabinetisation, the ComCom needs to sort out Sub LLU. At the current regulated pricing even Telstraclear haven't put gear in cabinet which indicates it's overpriced.

Old ATM Handover Links were throttled/dimensioned

The older (ATM based) Telecom Wholesale plans UBS, UBA etc that ISP's used to provide a DSL service were effectively throttled by dimensioning at the handover point. In peak time ISP's were regularly hitting this seemingly artificial limit, the more data they allowed customers to use the more congested their service appeared.

This had two effects, ISP's needed to keep caps small to restrict usage and there was no point ISP's buying more bandwidth than the dimensioned handover rate.

Note: Fortunately this last one seems to be a non issue now with the EUBA service and ethernet handover links on the Telecom NGN.

ISP's have been slow to change over users though.

Beccara

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#490395 7-Jul-2011 08:25

Ragnor:
High International Bandwidth Costs

Most ISP's don't have the scale to buy direct from SXC because SXC only sell minimum STM-16 on something like 20 year contract (sorry can't remember the exact amounts) but the cost is high (relative to the size of our ISP's).

All NZ ISP's in practice buy from resllers at higher per Mbit price than buying direct from SXC but in smaller total Mbit quanity than SXC offers directly.

The resellers are: Vocus, Asianetcom/Pacnet, Global Gateway (Telecom), Reach (Telstra), Odyssey Networks (Orcon) and Verizon.. there might be a few more now I haven't kept up to date.

This isn't likely to change, I know that one of the two proposed new cables will actually have higher requirements, STM-16 is ~2.4gbit, The other proposed cable isn't telling anyone yet what the minimum bandwidth buy will be.

But SXC transit only gets you to LA/SYD, The reason you pay higher per mbit buying from a reseller like Vocus/ANC/GG/Reach/ODD/Verizon is because they handle getting the data from the SXC handover points to the rest of the world. Medium sized ISP's simply wouldn't have the resources to handle this if they could buy in .5gbit chunks from SXC because they would need resources and contacts in multiple countries to ensure full global connectivity.

International bandwidth and its related costs are an extremely complex topic that has to factor in things like cable build costs, loans, operational costs, standby repair crews, transit from the landing points to the rest of the world and the skillset's needed by all the people involved.

2 Years ago I would have agreed that SXC was being greedy and the price of international was very high, Medium sized bandwidth buys were $200-300 per mbit but now with SXC's price drops (arguably because of talks of new cables) International now costs around $80-125 for medium sized buys from resellers, This has some room to drop but not alot

Perhaps Sam Morgan would improve the quality of NZ broadband more by buying a few STM-16 circuits on SXC for 10 years and opening a DC in Auckland where all the content providers in the world could put CDN's for free with high speed connects back to LA for updates and chucking the whole thing on APE? It's ALWAYS going to be cheaper to access content in AKL than LA

DonGould

3892 posts

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#490436 7-Jul-2011 09:38

Beccara: 2 Years ago I would have agreed that SXC was being greedy and the price of international was very high, Medium sized bandwidth buys were $200-300 per mbit but now with SXC's price drops (arguably because of talks of new cables) International now costs around $80-125 for medium sized buys from resellers, This has some room to drop but not alot

Yet in Australia they're openly talking about data costing $40/mbit international.

What we need is PPC2 and nothing more.

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