> According to them, you could download 5000 emails and view 7000 web > pages on 500mb. I challenge anybody on a 500mb plan to try it, and tell > me what their bill is next month. No, I won't pay the extra!
I forgot to note: nobody on a 500mb plan is likely to actually have usage anywhere near this, so if all they're doing is viewing web pages and reading email they're unlikely to go near their limit. Not even if they have a worse case of spam-and-virus ridden incoming email than I've ever seen. Of course, everybody should at least be updating their OS for security fixes - right? *nudge* *nudge* > Another gotcha There's another one I forgot - and it's a biggie, though not so much for you Mac folks. Viri. If a user gets infected with a mass-mailing worm or eight (as is so very common - in fact, many of the virus-ridden messages I get at my firewall at work came from IP addresses on BigPond), that can add up to a fair bit of transmitted traffic. Most of the worms trapped by our gateway are about 40kb, including message headers etc. Some are 160kb. Imagine the computer sending one of those a minute, all month. Call it 40,000 copies - that's about 1.6GB. *ouch*. Telstra-friendly viewpoint: it's not Telstra's problem if the customer is running a horribly insecure OS and gets themselves infected by a worm - probably by running it manually, and ignoring everybody who tells them "GET A VIRUS SCANNER". Still - this gives another example of the sort of issues customers can run into that they may not be aware of. The right thing to do is to speed-limit the customer rather than charge them, after they go over their limit. At the very least, the customer should be offered the _option_ of whether to pay extra, or have their access speed limited (or even cut off) - with the default being no extra charges. > P.S: While writing and researching this email, I measured traffic of > 60mb to Vigin Radio UK, which I'm listening to right now. It's not even > a 128kb/s stream. I also downloaded five to ten megabytes of websites. It's closer to 70mb now. Craig Ringer
