Many Australians have dreamed of having US-style freedom when it comes to downloading. Over there, having an "unlimited" plan has historically meant being able to download hundreds of gigabytes a month without fear of excess data charges or shaping.

There's been a bit of press lately though - big US ISPs are fed up with a small group of users using vast amounts of bandwidth downloading. Time Warner have just announced that in response to 5% of their customer base using 50% of the network capacity (!), they're going to trial a new system:

The company, the second-largest cable provider in the United States, will start a trial in Beaumont, Texas, in which it will sell new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages with unlimited downloads.

No word on the plans yet, and o doubt they'll still have much bigger quotas than we have over here, but it'll be interesting to see how this works out.

I doubt they will ever rival the Bigpond 10gb plan which include uploads...

This means fewer seeders

lol Bigpond is now 12gb plan but you have to 'upgrade' you're plan to it. And not like that 2gb really helps. i just upgraded to the new 25gb plan.

Why would you use Bigpond when there are better priced ISP's around?

it's not always about price

it's not always about price

Why would you use Bigpond when there are as good ISPs, with better customer service and are cheaper?

it's not always about price and customer service

convenience. ie one bill etc
thats the only reason i can think of

availability of other options, satisfaction with current service, reliability and cainer speed of current service

Why would you use Bigpond when there are better priced ISP's around?

Unfortunately not everyone is able to go to other ISP's, I know some that are stuck on cable. I for one am stuck on Optarse cable :(.

As someone living in the US, I wish I had my old iiNet plan here.

I'm on Comcast (which is basically the BigPond equivalent in terms of monopoly and bundling with other services), and even though they're "unlimited", they'll inject RST packets into your communication to stop you from doing anything high volume, like torrent applications. It's dubious enough for any cause, but f***ing annoying when I just want to get the latest patch for WoW, or want to upload something big to work from home through our VPN.

I'd rather have a set limit that was completely clean than a polluted unlimited stream that doesn't let me get what I want.

whats this about "upgrading" to a 12gb plan on telstra?

There is no 10gb plan anymore, so you can either stay on the old 10 gig plan (which might be cheaper) or change to the 12 gig one.

*shrug*

I'm on the at&t DSL Elite plan - $35 a month for:

Downstream Speed: Up to 6.0 Mbps
Upstream Speed: Up to 768 Kbps

It serves my purposes. Mind you, if they start capping or charging per MB I won't be happy..

methinks telcos don't want to be the dumb pipes in apple's business model

tis getting interesting!

Here's some news on the plans. I'm surprised:

The operator plans to offer four different packages that would cap monthly data downloads at 5, 10, 20 or 40 Gigabytes, according to Time Warner Cable spokesman Alex Dudley. As of yet, there’s no unlimited option planned for the trial. Pricing has not been determined for the tiers, he said.

The tiered pricing would apply only to new customers, not existing ones. If customers exceed their data-download limit, they will be charged additional per-gigabyte fees

That's way, way less than I would have anticipated - but it sort of confirms my theory that the vast, vast, vast majority of Internet users don't currently use the massive amounts of bandwidth the hardcore extremist "give me more bandwidth now" people say are used. QUEL SURPRISE!

And they're actually charging if you go over... this might sting a lot of newbies, watching tv episodes on mtv.com, youtube, hours of skype...