Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 26 May 2009 10:56
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
The power of alert users and the press has uncovered an Optus contract
snafu surrounding slowdown speeds when broadband limits are reached,
with Optus only delivering half of what was promised. Will Optus ever
get it right?
Long time Optus watcher and APCMag.com columnist Dan Warne has brought forth
the news that Optus had promised Naked DSL users a shaped speed of 128Kbps once broadband limits had struck, but had only been delivering 64Kbps.
Update 27-05-2009: Optus has responded to the questions posed in this article regading "Optus Fusion Plus Plans", one of which offers a whopping 256Kbps shaped service - details of that response are on page 2. The original article continues:
The APC reader was Michael Sanchez who couldn’t understand why his shaped speed always ended up being 64Kbps rather than the promised 128Kbps.
So investigations ensued, and it turns out that Optus definitely made a snafu, and instead of doing the right thing and bumping up the shaped speeds to 128Kbps, has instead done the dirty and has weakly decided to go with the 64Kbps shaped offering instead.
APCMag reports that Optus will now contact all of its Naked DSL customers to offer them the chance to cancel their contracts should they so desire, but really, Optus should have bitten the bullet and offered 128Kbps instead.
The whole episode really calls into question just how much Optus can be trusted. At present, my parents are signed up to Optus, and they are considering moving to a 20GB “Fusion” plan currently offered by Optus.
Disappointingly, these new “Optus ‘yes’ Fusion Plus” plans count uploads towards the download limit, but offers (at the $99 plan level) 20GB of download data and “unlimited” data (which turns out to be 30GB) on the $129 plan.
For the lower 2GB and 7GB plans, Optus promises a 64Kbps shaping speed once limits are reached. For the 20GB plan, Optus says the shaped speed is 128Kbps. And for the "unlimited/30GB" plan, there's a PROMISE to shape speeds to a much nicer 256Kbps.
But can this be trusted? Has Optus made another snafu?
Please read on to page 2.
