2GB/day on Ihug Broadband 3 plan

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DS9

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Topic # 15067 2-Aug-2007 14:55

Hi,

Ihug are changing there fair use policy to 2GB/day, if you download more, then the next day will be at 64kbps, I think this is great as I never download movies but I download lots of games and they are sometimes 4GB and have to be done over a week, as I need a good connection for video calling, now I can do it over a couple of days. What does everyone else think?

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325 posts

Ultimate Geek
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Reply # 80889 2-Aug-2007 15:56

Seems to be a work in progress as the outline of the policy is contradicted by the detail :

average data usage over previous 3 days	download speed
< 500 MB daily	Full speed (as fast as your phone line allows)
> 500 MB daily	2 Mbps
> 1 GB daily	512 kbps
> 2 GB daily	64 kbps

Since they can't manage to deliver anything beyond about 100kbps at the moment it's a bit academic.

Edit: also the addendum of "if someone uses more than 20GB a month, their speed will be reduced to 64kbps for the rest of the month." makes this just a plan with a 20GB cap and the added restriction of a daily cap. Silly.

sgra070

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

Reply # 80891 2-Aug-2007 16:22

Here's the email that ihug sent out to their broadband 3 customers earlier today:

We hope you're loving your broadband with ihug!

We've had lots of feedback about making our broadband 3 fair use policy easier to understand...

And that's just what we've done, so we wanted to give you a quick update (as per our terms and conditions)!

Gone are the days of rolling averages and slower speeds if you ever use more than 500 MB in a day - our new broadband 3 policy is much simpler.

How does the new fair use policy work?

From September 3rd, 2007 you'll be able to do more online each day without being slowed down!

That's because we've increased the fair use policy to 2GB a day (in other words, 2 full length movies or around 400 songs). If you do happen to download more than 2GB on a day, you'll simply surf at 64kbps for a day - no more confusing calculations to make!

Our new fair use policy also makes sure a few 'enthusiastic' people don't spoil things for everyone else by using unreasonable amounts of data - so if someone uses more than 20GB a month, their speed will be reduced to 64kbps for the rest of that month. (If you happen to be one of the few that use more than this each month, broadband 3 probably isn't the best plan for you - click here to check out our other plans with up to 60GB of data!)

Click here to find out more about the new fair use policy.

We hope this makes your broadband 3 plan easier to manage so you can enjoy your time online without any hassles!

DS9, I think that you may have neglected to read the whole message. Starting next month, they are imposing a 20GB monthly limit. If you go over, you'll now spend the rest of the month at 64 kbps. I think your days of downloading games and video calling may be over.

On broadband 3, I have taken to watching TV exclusively on the internet, and sometimes managed up to 40GB a month. No longer. I'll have to go and dust off the VCR, and put up with waiting months or years for new shows to appear in NZ. Thanks ihug.

... and lets put 20 GB into context:

A broadband subscriber in Japan on a 50 Mbit plan can download 20 GB in about 1 hour.
With a 56K modem, if you were constantly downloading 24 hours a day, you could (theoretically) download up to 17 GB in a month.

Look at it this way - what you are being offered is effectively a dial-up account with a slightly higher burst speed at certain times of the day, if you're lucky. So what ihug says is right - things are much simpler now. There's no reason to stay on this plan any more.

anirudhsood

21 posts

Geek
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Reply # 81050 3-Aug-2007 21:23

I totally agree that broadband 3 is not the plan to be in. I have been with ihug for some time and always been bitten by their policy changes. How can they just change the policy for all the subscribers who they have a contract with. Earlier they changed the off peak hours from 12-8am to 2am-10am and removed weekends, a plan which I used be in earlier. I guess their logo :) should not have a smile any more it is more like :( for me.

Evinta

118 posts

Master Geek

Reply # 81052 3-Aug-2007 22:26

This is a perfect example of why NZ is behind.

paradoxsm

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Reply # 81056 3-Aug-2007 23:06

Yes.. but how long until their already breaking systems fail on this too.

"2 full length movies"... now they wouldn't be pirated 800MB DivX's now would they?

I remember how they used to promote their old "off peak" plans, just set your Torre... ahem, "Downloads" to run while you are asleep.

Panq

42 posts

Geek

Reply # 81063 4-Aug-2007 01:28

I did the exact same thing - read the e-mail too quickly, thought "Awesome, 2GB/day," re-read the e-mail today, and noticed the 20GB cap. Definitely not going to stay on this plan, this ISP, or recommend ihug to anyone else. I'm pretty sure most ISPs don't charge $60/month for a 20GB plan which is, at best, 1-3MBit with horrible latency.

For comparison, last month's 'Enthusiasm' totalled 64GB.

NZtechfreak

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Reply # 81087 4-Aug-2007 11:06

Grrr, this is soo irritating.

I will have to rethink staying with Ihug.

I've had terrible customer service recently when changing address, and now this on top of the terrible latency you speak of.

64kbps for the rest of the month!!!! Thats beyond terrible.

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sbiddle

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Reply # 81100 4-Aug-2007 13:21

Evinta: This is a perfect example of why NZ is behind.

In what respect?

If you want to download stuff all day then choose an appropiate plan. Don't expect a $50 "unlimited" plan to be suitable.

anirudhsood

21 posts

Geek
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Reply # 81102 4-Aug-2007 14:05

In what respect?

If you want to download stuff all day then choose an appropiate plan. Don't expect a $50 "unlimited" plan to be suitable.

How do you justify for people who signed up to unlimited plan and then ihug decided to change the policy by limiting the unlimited to just 20GB per month.

sgra070

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

Reply # 81104 4-Aug-2007 14:19

There's no denying that all of the ihug plans are now extremely unattractive for so called "heavy" downloaders.

In my case I generally do between 20 and 45 GB a month. This is mainly downloading things like high def video. Nobody is broadcasting high def in NZ, so there's really no other option.

Now with ihug my only option would be broadband 7 for $140 with a 60 GB limit. ihug says this plan is appropriate if you're "an extreme gamer or downloader". I don't put myself into either of those categories.

Now I've virtually made up my mind to switch ISPs to Slingshot.

Over there, I could get a Swift account for $29.95, and buy a 50 GB datablock for $40. This would give a total of 52 GB a month for $69.95.

$140 on ihug versus $69.95 on Slingshot. Well, it's a no brainer isn't it?

Added to that, the ihug accounts are incredibly inflexible. Reach your limit, and either spend the rest of the month crippled at 64 kpbs, or pay excess of $2 per GB. On Slingshot if you reach your limit, you can simply purchase another datablock and continue at full speed. And if you use less data - you pass less!

It's obvious what ihug are doing here. They don't have enough good technical staff and they are struggling to maintain quality of service for all of their subscribers. To compensate, they are using this none too subtle approach to move all of the "extreme downloaders" off of their network.

Evinta

118 posts

Master Geek

Reply # 81111 4-Aug-2007 16:10

sbiddle:
Evinta: This is a perfect example of why NZ is behind.

In what respect?

If you want to download stuff all day then choose an appropiate plan. Don't expect a $50 "unlimited" plan to be suitable.

You haven't looked at plans overseas haven't you? the prices we are paying for what we get make us way behind.

Besides a "unlimited" plan should be just that. I don't spend all day online, but i expect to be able to download large files sometimes to do what i like to do. WoW patch wise took me two days to update. And that would get rid of one day since it was over 2gb of downloading.

Panq

42 posts

Geek

Reply # 81124 4-Aug-2007 21:51

sbiddle:
Evinta: This is a perfect example of why NZ is behind.

In what respect?

If you want to download stuff all day then choose an appropiate plan. Don't expect a $50 "unlimited" plan to be suitable.

The current broadband 3 plan isn't shockingly good value-for-money. You can't really compare a connection with such poor latency to something offered by the ISPs which let you turn interleaving off.

Now with ihug my only option would be broadband 7 for $140 with a 60 GB limit. ihug says this plan is appropriate if you're "an extreme gamer or downloader". I don't put myself into either of those categories.

Again, the interleaving issue makes ihug inappropriate for any extreme gamers. I went on the plan because trading speed and latency for bulk downloading made it more appropriate for myself personally, but with the changes it'll just be a standard 20GB plan with the additional drawback of being throttled if you use more than 2GB in one day. The Orcon ZeroShock plan costs the same and doesn't throttle you daily (though it does restrict P2P). Xnet offers 25.44GB of unrestricted access for the price, too. $60 for 'Unlimited' downloading (which is never realistically going to beat 60-70GB anyway) isn't even slightly unreasonable considering how restricted the actual speed is, but sticking with the plan after the changes simply makes no sense when you can get faster speeds, a cap several gigs larger, and no random throttling before using up your cap for the same price.

tl54

30 posts

Geek

Reply # 81414 7-Aug-2007 09:35

sbiddle:
Evinta: This is a perfect example of why NZ is behind.

In what respect?

If you want to download stuff all day then choose an appropiate plan. Don't expect a $50 "unlimited" plan to be suitable.

In US, you pay the same amount of money to get an 'absolutely unlimited' broadband; In Japan, you pay 1/2; In Korea, you pay 1/2; In China, you pay 1/3. And yes, they are all unlimited, in terms of both speed and data allowance.

Basically, you are paying a lot more just to get a restricted internet access here in NZ. Still think we are ahead of the world?

freitasm

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Reply # 81415 7-Aug-2007 09:50

tl54: In US, you pay the same amount of money to get an 'absolutely unlimited' broadband; In Japan, you pay 1/2; In Korea, you pay 1/2; In China, you pay 1/3. And yes, they are all unlimited, in terms of both speed and data allowance.

Basically, you are paying a lot more just to get a restricted internet access here in NZ. Still think we are ahead of the world?

Welcome to Geekzone! I see you are new around here. We have discussed this many times before (you might want to read old discussions) and it came down to scale.

In the U.S. you have 180 million Internet users, and most of the content they read comes from within their own country. The same applies to China.

New Zealand has 3 million Internet users and most of the content comes from one site (60% of NZ Internet traffic is on Trade Me) and the rest comes mostly from overseas, impacting the cost because of the need to pay cable providers, pop providers in different continents and other fees.

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cokemaster

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Reply # 81416 7-Aug-2007 09:51

tl54:
sbiddle:
Evinta: This is a perfect example of why NZ is behind.

In what respect?

If you want to download stuff all day then choose an appropiate plan. Don't expect a $50 "unlimited" plan to be suitable.

In US, you pay the same amount of money to get an 'absolutely unlimited' broadband; In Japan, you pay 1/2; In Korea, you pay 1/2; In China, you pay 1/3. And yes, they are all unlimited, in terms of both speed and data allowance.

Basically, you are paying a lot more just to get a restricted internet access here in NZ. Still think we are ahead of the world?

Its been a while since we've had trolls like this so here comes the feeding

In the US - where is the majority of the content coming from? Yes the US. And before you label the US the paradise - don't forget that there are PLENTY of people annoyed at the practices by AT&T, baby bells, and the cable companies (including poor performance, high prices, and nice little 'fair usage polices). Also please try getting broadband in poorly populated areas and let me know ok? Or better yet - try getting quality service in an area serviced by only one provider.
In Japan, where is the majority of the content coming from? Japan \
In Korea, same applies.

China...most of the content comes from... China! And since I've been there for a while I can say that international bandwidth is quite low (when I was there, 56k was faster back to NZ) and a lot of ISPs are throttling internet connections.

Now... lets look at NZ - where does the majority of traffic come from??? Drum roll please... OVERSEAS. Is international bandwidth more limited and expensive than domestic bandwidth - yes!

There are lots of other factors though like population density, investment etc which weren't taken into account when forming that statement. I suggest you do some research before blindly making statements like that.

Evinta:

You haven't looked at plans overseas haven't you? the prices we are paying for what we get make us way behind.

Besides a "unlimited" plan should be just that. I don't spend all day online, but i expect to be able to download large files sometimes to do what i like to do. WoW patch wise took me two days to update. And that would get rid of one day since it was over 2gb of downloading.

Please read the above for the plan overseas remark...

Last time I checked - I could easily download 2GB within a couple of hours or less (particularly with 7.6mbps sync rates). Perhaps you want to get a better plan which allows for data (and umm pay for actually using it) or make sure your broadband connection is working ok or perhaps check the site - maybe it has issues which is out of the scope of NZ broadband (though I wouldn't put it past a few guys who would happily jump on the bandwagon and blame NZ (with our great culture of blame) anyway).

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