Wednesday, March 19, 2008

A Bandwidth Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, a social primate lived with his wife and son in a big, huge house in a magical place called the “American suburb.” In the American suburb, the social primate was able to connect to the internet at a fairly low price, but what was more amazing is that his download speeds were incredibly fast and there were never (ever) any limits on how much he downloaded. Life was good for the social primate and his family, who loved to spend hours everyday listening to and watching all sorts of new media content.

Then, one day, during a period of turbulent weather, the social primate and his family were forced to leave the American suburb and its plentiful high-speed bandwidth. They boarded a large jet and went flying for what seemed like days to the other side of the planet. They arrived in a magical country called “Aus-tra-li-a,” which resembled the American suburb in many ways, but also contained lots of strange animals that screeched and crawled all over the place. After patiently waiting a few weeks in their new but much smaller home, they were finally able to connect their computers to the internet once more, happily resuming their sedentary lifestyle in front of the glowing screens.

But while the social primate and his family happily downloaded new podcasts, streaming audio, photographs, movies, and television shows, something sinister was happening, about which the social primate was totally ignorant. You see, even though they were now paying double what they used to pay in the American suburb for their high-speed broadband service, they were also quickly starting to “use up” their bandwidth capacity each month.

Finally, after a particularly heavy weekend of downloading inspired by the offerings of the iTunes store, the social primate received a bill from the Big Bad Broadband provider from the Big Pond. Imagine his horrible shock when he found that it was for $732! You see, the social primate and his family had exceeded their monthly 25 GB allotment just a few days before, and were now being asked to pay nearly $600 for the additional 4 GB of downloads that had since occurred. As you might expect, there was much crying and thrashing about in the social primate’s household, and it looked like they might never download again.

Hope returned to the social primate’s household a few days later when the Big Bad Broadband provider from the Big Pond told the social primate’s wife that he could appeal the bill if he submitted a form explaining what happened. It would take 3-4 weeks for the Big Bad Broadband provider to make a decision. The social primate and his family now wait patiently for an answer.

What is the moral of the story, you might ask? Well, I can’t think of one. Perhaps you can…

9 comments:

Danielle said...

My goodness. The moral of the story is: switch to Internode. If we go over our plan, it's slow as molasses, but at least they don't charge us $600 for it. We had a tendency to go over our plan quite often before we beefed up our package, but we could always buy extra gigs before our rollover date if we couldn't live with the slowness.

Anonymous said...

-> Leave BigPond as soon as possible!
-> Go to http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/
-> Enter phone number
-> Plan search
-> Enter desired requirements
-> Filter by cost
-> Heaps of ADSL2+ (24576 speed) plans offered (eg. $60 for 30Gb).

Anonymous said...

I'm with Bigpond as well, but have a 12 Gb plan that throttles after our limit, rather than charging for the excess.

The Prof said...

I wish I had received all this advice when I first got here! Instead, I am stuck on a two-year contract with my provider. I have switched our plan to 60GB/mo., so this shouldn't happen again.

Anonymous said...

I use OPTUS and have unlimited downloads but the broadband speed is slow compared to the US. I currently pay around $55 a month for it which is also about double what I was I paying for COMCAST cable internet in the US.

Other then the price and slowness I have had no major dramas with OPTUS.

Author! Author! said...

No sympathy here...I only get 1 GB per month!!! There is no downloading at my house!

Kwirkie said...

I think I sucked all the air out of the room when I read this. This has been my fear. I have not gone over our whopping 5 GB yet and know that if I did I would be sent on a slow boat back to the US but I have been stung by my phone use. Not quite $600! I feel for you you and pray this never happens to us!

Kwirkie said...

I think I sucked all the air out of the room when I read this. This has been my fear. I have not gone over our whopping 5 GB yet and know that if I did I would be sent on a slow boat back to the US but I have been stung by my phone use. Not quite $600! I feel for you you and pray this never happens to us!

Anonymous said...

Yeowch! :eek:

In the future, you may want to download a usage meter such as this one. We've got one that monitors our usage by the day, week, and month...and turns red when we are getting close to our limit. Which we almost did last month, thanks to DH downloading nearly the entire Justice League series! (granted, I watched 'em too *g*)

And I totally agree with Danielle, as soon as you can get out of your contract dump the Cesspool - I mean, Pond of Big!