I live in Australia. Before you completely discount everything I say as null and void, we’re experiencing an upheaval at the moment in regards to Australian Internet. Yes, we’re far behind the rest of the world in availability and value for money as well as speed and service. The ISPs here in Aus are making a mint at being poorly run and offering little to no customer service (minus a handful of exceptions) and then charging the world for any customer service that you get.
There is not a single ISP around that offers complete unlimited ADSL2+ (except Telstra (Australia’s major ISP/Telephone company) for $350/month). There are very few ISP’s (they are out there, though at a price) that offer even unlimited ADSL 1. And then when they do offer unlimited, it is either subject to a FUP (Fair use policy) or charge you the planet on the assumption that only a business would require completely unlimited downloading. You don’t need to go to the extreme of complete unlimited per month to have an enjoyable browsing experience. But Telstra offers their “extreme” download plan of 10gb. In lamens terms, even if you had slow-arsed “broadband” internet, you could download your cap in a few days rendering the rest of the month useless in either further charges to the monthly bill or capped to a speed so slow, you might as well be living on dial up. Telstra’s smallest plan on offer is 200mb a month. This equates to some emails and some light browsing. Or you could use up the whole monthly quota by downloading 1 TV episode. I understand not every one requires huge amounts of downloads as some people have lives (although this is a common myth). But where the question lies is once you hit you the 200mb (and you will if you visit your emails every day and go to news.com every other day), you get charged per mb. So you have unsuspecting users who might download some files which are big and take a little longer than normal. So instead of ending up with a $30 bill, they’ve now ended up with a $100 because they went 100-200mb a month over. The sort of people that sign up with the 200mb a month plans are the same people who don’t really know what they’ve just signed up for. “Fast speed? 200mb a month? AWESOME. 200 sounds like a big number. I’ll do it!”
By this standard, most ISPs claim to give you an “unlimited” price plan, being subject to an AUP/FUP (acceptable use policy/fair use policy) which means they can cut you any time saying that however much you’ve downloaded for that month has exceeded an AUP. 10gb, 50gb…even 3gb (yes, this has happened to me in the past from shady ISP practise) and then charge you accordingly. How they do this is on a percentile basis. Usually if every one is utilising the network heavily in a particular month, they take the top 3% downloaders (or offenders depending on which side of the fence you’re on) and shape them. This 3% figure can adjust depending upon who is downloading how much and how much the network is suffering for light people who haven’t suffocated the network. The only problem with this is then it is not unlimited.
There is two sides of the story for this:
Side A: It is not possible to offer every one unlimited broadband. If we were offering true unlimited downloads to every one, they would have to either make it so expensive that no one could afford it or the network would just suffer and EVERYONE would experience poor performance due to the geographic nature of Australia and the cost to maintain such a network.
Side B: So, why offer unlimited in the first place? As far as I can tell, it is to fool general consumers and it is a political move so it gives John Doe the impression that Australian broadband can handle large amounts of download. Only comparitively to 10 and 20gb a month are these AUPs are unlimited. They’re not really but it gives people the idea that they can leech all they want every month; some succeed, some don’t.
Recently there was some cracker down in South Australia (some wanker politician) who thought all internet should be filtered at an ISP level. iiNet (South Australian ISP) was the first ISP to trial this and I think they’re still doing the trial. So you might be at home late one night thinking about nutting one out and you can’t get to your favourite porn site and you’ve lost all that lesbian porn I gave you ages ago (ya know, hypothetically). And then you try to use your imagination only to realize that years of watching videos has stripped away any imaginative ability. You try but it’s like jerking off warm sausage. New York is not even close to being as backed up as you are right now. You’re so sexually backed up that you have a cold shower. One of many to come all because of some wanker who thought he was saving the kids from such filth when really it should be the responsibility of the lazy moronic parents.