[H-GEN] Telstra and Linux

[Russell Stuart]

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I don't think there is such a thing as a genuine "unlimited" internet
account in Australia.  The overseas bandwidth costs too much, so it is
not a sustainable business model.  In TPG's case all TPG accounts are
subject to reasonable use clauses.  In TPG's eyes downloading too much
is not reasonable use even though account is advertised as unlimited.

I have a friend who has direct experience with this.  He decided to use
TPG's $19.95 modem account, which is also advertised as unlimited.  He
is a heavy user - a couple of gig a month I guess.  A few weeks after
joining he noticed that his link was running very slowly.  After going
through the usual amount of head scratching, cable checking, modem
swaps, and calls to his telco he finally rang TPG.  TPG said he was
abusing the system, and would remain throttled from now on.

TPG's response is no different from iinet, netspace or indeed optus
cable.  Like TPG, neither netspace not iinet will charge you for excess
usage - they throttle you instead.  But iinet and netspace are up front
about it - they publish what the limits are, explain how and when the
throttling will be applied and when it will be removed.

In one respect iinet and netspace are unlimited.  If your traffic
remains with the ISP's network its free.  I think there are one or two
other ISP's who also do this.  For example, if the clustering guys
decided keep their machines at home and connect them via one of these
ISP' they could send as much data as they wanted.  Also, these ISP's
tend to allow free traffic to and from PIPE
(http://www.pipenetworks.com/docs/internet.htm) as well.  I am told by a
PIPE user that PIPE maintain several cache's, including a large P2P site
for some client or other.  This is about as close to unlimited downloads
free as you can get in Australia.

On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 06:41, Sandra Milne wrote:
> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
> 
> On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 21:15:50 +1000
> Marco Grigull <kni501ss at optushome.com.au> wrote:
> 
> 
> > Im on the 3G plan, Ill probably switch to adsl with 3gig peak 6gig offpeak and
> > free mirrors when my contract runs out.  I hear inet offer this service for what 
> > I am currently paying.
> 
> We just finished our contract and are about to finish our first month on download cap. Whilst looking for information for a TAFE Assignment the other day, I noticed that TPG Internet offers unlimited ADSL 256/64 for $69.95. After much discussion in the household, we've decided to go with that. Significantly slower than cable, but at least we don't have to worry about how much we're downloading.
> 
> And BTW, there is no 'free traffic' with optusnet. Last I heard mirror.aarnet was on optusnet, and they promote it, but still no free traffic. that's one of our main reasons for quitting. another is, who the hell wants the speed of cable so that they can download only 3gig? we couldnt' even find out if the game servers are free traffic (I suspect they're not, and I've not heard anything good about them in any case)
> 
> Sandra.
> 
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