A terabyte data cap

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011 at 1:00 pm

Hamish Fletcher in the NZ Herald reports:

CallPlus plans to offer internet users hooked into the ultra-fast broadband network at least a terabyte of data each month.

While New Zealand may be looking forward to the 100 megabit speeds on the fibre internet network, commentators are worried the infrastructure will not be used to its potential as data caps will restrict the amount customers can download each month.

Slingshot and CallPlus director Malcolm Dick said his companies could offer unlimited data on the ultra-fast broadband network if more internet links out of New Zealand were built.

“A couple of years out … you’d hope that all those caps would be removed and it would be the same as in Europe and the States. Certainly in the worst case we’re looking in the terabytes [of internet use a month]. It will be up to at least a terabyte, I reckon, it has to be,” Dick said.

Having more content hosted and cached in NZ would help also, but sadly it is cheaper for major content providers to host in the US than in NZ.

A 1 TB data cap would be a lot better than the current offerings. But let us look at how quick it might still be gobbled up.

Say you are on the 30 Mb/s plan. That is equal to 3.75 MB/s. A TB is around 1 million (2^20) MBs so a 1 TB cap would last for around 280,000 seconds or 4,660 minutes which is around 78 hours.

Now a month has around 720 hours in it, but you don’t tend to spend all day on the Internet and you don’t spend all your time using the maximum speed.

So a 1 TB data limit would look to be pretty good to me.

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A non data capped plan from Telecom

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 10:59 am

The Herald reports:

Telecom is to offer an uncapped broadband internet deal but customers will have to trade off connection speed.

From next week a new $60 a month “all you can eat” plan will be offered with the compromise that downloads may be slower at peak times. …

Brayham said during peak hours – generally 3pm to 10pm – internet traffic “shaping” would target files consuming large amounts of bandwidth, which could include some music, movie and software downloads.

I think this is a great move. NZ is the only OECD country with no non data capped plans – finally we have one.

I have no problem with data capped customers getting priority speeds during peak times. File sharers often download overnight and are generally more worried about the data cap, not the speed – so long as it is reasonable.

Of course we have to see exactly how fast things go during both off peak and peak times, but if the service holds up Telecom could do well with this offering.

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