On Fri, 2004-04-02 at 17:49, Greg Pennefather wrote: > We're using Swiftel in the office and it has been reliable and is very price > competitive. I think they have the same cheap deal as everyone else at $29 > with 200MB but their other deals include generous amounts of downloads and > the excess charge is 0.5c per meg which is about one twelfth of most other > ISPs and a thirtieth of Telstra's cheapest excess rate.
That rate is actually getting toward quite reasonable - something I thought would be impossible with Telstra's ATM virtual circuit traffic charges and peering charges. WN's rate is $10/GB which comes out at about 2x the Swiftel one - still pretty good. I love the fact that you can set your plan to shaped, but still buy more traffic allowance _at_ _your_ _option_. I'll be truly happy when bandwidth is <$1/GB for Aust-local traffic, with international below $5/GB. That makes streaming 'net radio etc vaguely reasonable. OTOH, my current plan has a 30GB allowance, so traffic is already getting somewhat reasonable if you count traffic allowances included in plans. My plain costs about $110/month, which comes out at ~$3.6/GB for included traffic. At WN's going rate for extra traffic, that's $300 of traffic included ($153 at Swiftel rates, $460 at Telstra rates). The built-in allowance on the plan is actually enough to use a VPN and things like 'net radio ( so long as you're careful ). If you can do it over WAIX or PIPE of course, you're home free. I run an IPv6/IPSec VPN between home and work over WAIX, and it doesn't cost a cent. To me, WAIX makes the difference between "ADSL is stupidly expensive to do many things with" and "ADSL is _really_ handy for VPNs etc, so long as you can communicate over a free peering point." It's also a proof that bandwidth needn't cost $15c/mb like certain ISPs think it should. Remember folks - bytes don't cost money. It does cost money to upgrade networks to handle more traffic, and some international peering points do byte-charge as a method to pay the upgrade and maintenance bills. Overall, though, traffic within Australia really shouldn't cost as much as it does. Unfortunately, there are some very one-sided peering agreements in place. Craig Ringer
