loosely speaking I guess this applies to full adsl and the best cable connections and those better quality offerings available to business customers.
My answer is obvious - I rent machinetime to people. But what does the average user hope to get from "broadband". Let me start with my own reason for getting ADSL at home. I wanted a permanent connection and I was already paying for an extra phone-line and a connection fee to an ISP. ADSL offered me a way of getting much better speed for about $20 more per month. Originally the data-cap during the ADSL trial was 300MB before you started paying 20c/MB .. I called up the trial guy and said wait a minute I can do easily 10MB a day just browsing (of course these days with a proxy on my side of the connection thats a bit excessive) still they immediately doubled that cap! To be honest I wasn't really that impressed with ADSL speed wise. I don't know what it is .. perhaps the huge hit we take as soon as we depart NZ and go to the US? Anyway - I changed to Jetstart (by that I mean Xtra's jetstart not any other ISP, there weren't any others when I began) because 1. it was cheaper and 2. it fulfilled my basic requirement of being on 24hrs but there was another reason 3. no cap. There have been periods when Xtra let the reigns loose - I think sometime before Jetstart was introduced they gave us 2 months of really unlimited full rate ADSL. These were the days of Napster - remember him :) well I just loaded that up and let people leech the heck out of my windows box. they moved about 15GB in the first 10days .. thats without me looking/listening to any streaming video/audio. The number of full rate video streams has really taken off nowdays, but ADSL isn't the way to watch them - it remians too slow and too expensive. My question for the group is if you had unlimited data at say 500K symmetric (send/recieve) what would you do with it? Regards Paul Swafford (Manager, E-caf@The Arts Centre) (Level 2/28 Worcester Boulevard, Christchurch, NZ) (ph/fax +64 3 3656480 www.e-caf.com)
