Telstra reaches for 500 GB quotas

By James Hutchinson on Jun 6, 2011 6:36 AM
Filed under Telco/ISP

More than double existing quotas.

Telstra is expected to launch its first fixed line broadband plans with 500 gigabyte quotas today, more than doubling its highest previous offering to home users.

The new plans, believed to officially launch on Monday, would offer quotes of between 5 GB for $78 and 500 GB for $148 when bundled with a fixed phone service. The highest plan would also provide unlimited calls between fixed line and mobiles along with a $10 international value pack and potentially the telco’s T-Box video on demand service.

According to correspondence delivered to resellers by Telstra and posted by users of the Whirlpool user forum, the bundles would launch as part of an end of financial year campaign.

The new plans would offer a significant markup in quota from the 200 GB currently offered for $159 under a similar bundle. A 200 GB quota is currently offered standalone for $69.95 a month, though it is unknown yet as to whether the new quotas would be offered standalone from bundles.

Telstra would not confirm the plans at time of writing.

Despite rising quotas for Telstra users, the plans continue to trail behind the multi-terabyte and unlimited plans launched by smaller service providers over the past year.

ISPs iiNet and iPrimus were among the first to offer plans with quotas of a terabyte or higher in August last year, quickly followed by TPG and others to meet growing customer demand. The trend has declined in recent months however, with iiNet killing off some of AAPT’s unlimited plans following its acquisition of the consumer business.

6 comments in this discussion

"Always horses for courses. After moving to cable I will never go back to ADSL in my current area. So it's either Optus or Telstra for me. Price is not a concern and 100GB per mth is plenty... I ..."

By Tinrib

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Comments: 6

Verity Pravda Jun 6, 2011 9:07 AM	Not forgetting of course vividwireless and their Unlimited plans.
umbria Jun 6, 2011 11:52 AM	Verity Pravda (translation Truth Truth?), these are of course fixed broadband half-terabyte plans. Vividwireless is selling "unlimited" over wireless (as their name suggests), and seems to me rather optimistic given the high cost of provisioning wireless bandwidth, which has traditionally been rationed by means of heavy-handed charges for data in both directions. Telstra recently began officially throttling wireless, and Vividwireless has also been asking heavy users not to burden the network during peak time: http://forum.vividwireless.com.au/forum/general-discussion/open-letter-vivid-wireless?page=1 Optus also recently fell foul of the regulator for limiting its unlimited mobile phone plans. The fact remains that a heavy user on any unlimited plan costs the provider money, usually offset by the 90% of users who use a small subset of their data allocation. But on wireless, a heavy user can quickly cause a domino effect of congestion, customer complaints, breach of promised service delivery and legal costs for a wireless provider without deep enough pockets to quickly provision extra bandwidth. That's why wireless and unlimited are rarely seen together, and why we are building an all-fibre NBN everywhere this is feasible.
scan06disk Jun 6, 2011 11:54 AM	"A 200 GB quota is currently offered standalone for $69.95 a month..." You do know that it really costs $99.95/mth, without all the bundling that goes with the $69 plan. http://go.bigpond.com/broadband/69-plan/
Mitch Jun 6, 2011 4:50 PM	Meh I still wouldn't want anything to do with Telsta/Bigpond.
Oldsniper Jun 6, 2011 11:18 PM	Telstra is still over priced AND under delivers both on cost, data limits and its customer service is still abysmal at best.
Tinrib Jun 7, 2011 3:28 PM	Always horses for courses. After moving to cable I will never go back to ADSL in my current area. So it's either Optus or Telstra for me. Price is not a concern and 100GB per mth is plenty... I would rather the speed any time.