The trial has not yet commenced. If you’re experiencing slower than normal speeds I recommend you speak to Bigpond Tech Support on 133 933.

If anbody has it, can you please send it too acans@bigpond.com ?

I’m sick of my world of warcraft updating at 5 – 10kbs

Just because Bigpond has offered larger plans in the past does not mean those plans are responsible for the increase in data consumption.
In fact the increase in data consumption by consumers would have caused Bigpond to introduce the larger plans.

Very rapidly consumers have wanted to consume more data through internet connected TVs, smart phones, tablets, photo frames and so on. Look at the uptake of internet connected devices over the past several years and it will likely closely resemble the increased demand for bandwidth and data consumption.

Looking at the plans, 500GB (500,000 Megabytes) on ADSL 2, say you can connect at 20 Megabit and can reliably download at 2 Megabytes per second.
Over the course of the month (30.4 days) you could download 5,259,480 Megabytes.
That is 10.3 times your monthly usage allowance.
So slowing your speed for a few hours really is not going to impact on your ability to consume all of the data which you paid for.

I dont know what the peak times are, lets assume they are 3PM to 9PM so 6 hours.
Now during this time lets assume your speed is slowed to 10 Megabit
This gives you a daily average speed of 17.5 Megabit for the day, call it 1.75 Megabytes per second
At this speed you could download 4,602,045 Megabytes in a month. This is still 9.2 times your monthly allowance.

However telstra is not going to flat out reduce the speed of your internet connection for the peak time, they are only going to slow the transfer of non time critical services so time critical services can flow uninterrupted.

In fact all telstra needs to allow you to consume 500GB of data is offer you a 1.557 Megabit/second plan and if they simply offered this speed to every consumer on a 500GB plan there would be no need for them to trial that they are trialling. However as a consumer you do not want to consume your 500GB evenly in a way which is even, you want to consume it when you are at home and not sleeping, in peak times.
So you therefore demand a speed which is much greater and could theoretically allow you to consume over 10 times the data you have paid for and offering this speed to every consumer is not easily achievable or cheap. This applied to every ISP, not just Telstra. (See below for another explanation of this)

If you do not think Telstra is expending their networks to cope with the increased demand then look at their mobile network.
4G was introduced not long ago and they are already now testing Class 4 4G devices which offer greater speed. Why? Because the faster you can access the internet on a mobile device the less time you are connected to the phone tower transferring data, slowing other people down.
If telstra was not interested in expending their network they would simply wait until the next technology came out rather than invest in allocating more spectrum and take a smaller step from Class 3 4G to Class 4 4G

This post from Whirlpool I think explains one of the problems with providing an internet service
***
I knew this topic would spark a lot of debate, I’m in an odd position myself in that i work within the Telco industry so i see all the costs associated with delivering any service to a customer.

I find the situation very similar to the power industry who supply power and the apparent gold plating of the power network, like the power network there are very big peaks in demand for the network, congestion is similar to a brown out on the power network not enough to meet the demand.

Think it like this.

1 Customer 500GB quota to deliver that over the entire month (28 days) i require
17.85 GB per day
0.74 GB per hour
…
0.20 MB per second
1.65 mbit per second

I can tell you that the wholesale costs to provide you with just 1.65mbit is greater than your monthly bill. Add to that i still need to add transmission and tail costs. The numbers don’t add up.

It gets worse because customers don’t use the bandwidth averaged over the month. They use it mostly during the peak times. Lets say peak times are 6pm-12pm (6 hours 25% of the day) to provide all of that 500GB in just those hours i now need 6.6mbit per customer.

So i buy 6.6mbit but it only gets used 25% of the time, i still have to pay for the 6.6mbit to be able to handle the data during peak only.

It can’t get worse can it, but it can. What are our access speeds 2>24mbit for DSL and ~100mbit for cable.

The users now expect that they should be able to use all that access speed whenever they want, i’ve already said it costs more than your monthly bill to provide the minimum required, how the hell do i provide 100mbit whenever you want it? At a cost less than you have given me?
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=2052528&p=15&#r286

That is coming from the CTO of a competing company who knows if Telstra was to drop the higher level plans that the users would be forced to move to another ISP and if iiNet happens to offer those plans they could potentially increase their subscribers.

(from Part C – ADSL in the BigPond Service section of Our Customer Terms)

By implementing DPI or slowing of a particular service during peak times Telstra are still providing you with the ADSL service which you agreed to receive.
This will do nothing to invalidate the contract.

As others have quite rightly pointed out if a customer takes and pays for a certain amount bandwidth they are entitled to use all of that bandwidth without restriction.

Regards,
Jack

Regards,

If your so worried about band width then why on earth did Telstra offer those Mega download plans to start with?

As as YOU have said and I quote “the network traffic is growing at double the amount for the past four years”.

Yet you have sat on your hands all that time and didn’t expand your network enough even though paraphrasing your own words we saw this coming and all the while still selling these mega plans.

Is this just greed? Or are you and I assume not, just being stupid?

Now you want to do this trial to make the “Telstra customer experience better”. Really, John !

Don’t change the rules of the game just because you didn’t do the work to win that game.

Myself and many other “Telstra customers experience” was just fine, You offered Megabytes and service we paid good money for it. Win Win.

I leave with some good advice from my third grade teacher he said “Failing to plan is planning to fail”

Don’t make loyal customers pay for your failing.

Why don’t you change to off-peak plans instead? Reduce peak download allowance to get people to download in off-peak times? This seems like an easy solution, unless there is another reason for using DPI.

Will you be adding cheaper internet plans that have DPI targeted advertising, like they do in the USA?