Internode hikes ADSL prices for power users - UPDATE

Stuart Corner
Monday, 04 June 2007 06:51

Your IT - Home IT

Broadband ISP Internode has raised prices, by almost 25 percent in some instances, on some of its high download residential and SOHO ADSL plans because of increasing cost of network capacity and more users pushing their plans to the limit.

In an email to customers announcing the changes, Internode said: "In the past, when typical line speeds were limited, in the main, to 1.5Mbps the incremental costs of offering additional download quota at a given line speed remained fairly linear. However...that this is no longer the case...The measured costs of providing services are indeed higher at these highest end plans, the price rises are, accordingly, concentrated toward those high end plans."

Internode product manager, Jim Kellett, said that when the current high capacity plans were priced the majority of users rarely exhausted their available quota each month, but that was proving to no longer be the case for the largest download plans. "We find the average person on an 80Gbyte plan is using more than 80 Gbytes while the average user on a 10Gbyte plan uses about four."

In other words, Kellett said, these customers were taking all the downloads they could afford, and the main application was peer-to-peer video files downloaded with the likes of bit torrent.

"We anticipate that within a year to two international capacity will drop in price," he said, adding, "there are more intelligent ways for peer-to-peer to work. If all peer-to-peer was tuned to look domestically thorough free peering points it would clobber the international download." There are several ways this could be done, but because a lot of peer-to-peer traffic breaches copyright laws, setting up a formal system would be difficult.

"I have faith that peer-to-peer is not going to go away," Kellett, said. "It will get more intelligent and cease to become an issue...  But right now it is a big issue...We know that other ISPs shape peer-to-peer traffic. We don't, and we don't want to but we a not going to rule that out."