News.com.au reports that Optus is joining Telstra in adding uploads to monthly cap limits, and that others may also start counting uploads.
As much as I despise the Australian ISP industry for having caps to start with, when in the US ISP’s are mostly all you can eat concerns, it does make sense that if we’re essentially paying for downloads, ISP’s should count uploads as well.
But here’s the problem: upload speeds from Australian ISP’s suck.
Take my provider for example. I get a 2mps download but only a 256kps upload speed, roughly 10 times the difference. Telstra Bigpong plans are similar, most only provide a 256kps upload speed, although for memory some may be as low as 128kps.
If I’m going to have to pay indirectly for uploading stuff to the web, the same money I’m proportionately paying for downloads, then simply I demand the same upload speed as I have for downloads. That would be the only fair and equitable solution, particularly when companies are quick to advertise their download speeds, but you’ve got to find the upload speeds in the fine print. Given that I’m a fairly regular uploader it would also make my life a whole lot easier as well.
Yep, upload speeds absolutely suck. Give me decent speeds so I can use my iSight properly please.
One reason it is done is to stop you hosting a site on your network. Sure you can do it on a 256 k connection but if it gets under load you will be in trouble.
The speeds do suck, even Skype suffers from time to time, And try video conferencing, forget it.
US ISP only advertise all you can eat access. There are actually bandwidth caps for nearly every ISP that advertises “unlimited Internet access.” They are generally secret limits, enforced selectively, and offer no way to monitor use. Here’s an AP sourced story about the issue: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7940
So, I guess the point is to be careful what you wish for.
Yes, even more interesting is the fact that customer support for upload speed is nil. For some inexplicable reason my upload speed dropped from 200kbps to around 80kbps (two weeks later it was back up and fine). However when I called Telstar/Bigpond for help they admitted that not only have they never received a complaint about upload speed before, they don’t even have the capability to track that problem – it isn’t in their support menu of problems tracked. The guy I talked to was very knowledgeable and helpful, but nothing was done (again, in the end it came up again). My iSight was certainly down during this time…