Dodo claims first 'free' broadband in Australia

By Stuart Corner
Thursday, 21 June 2007 06:19

Home IT

ISP Dodo Australia is offering customers an ADSL2+ service with up to 150Mbytes of download per month at no charge if they sign up for a Dodo telephone service.

The catch is that only half of this quota is available when most people would want to use it, from 9.00 am to 1.00 am. Once the 75MB quota in that, or the rest of the day, is exceeded users pay 18 cents per megabyte up to a maximum of $29.95 per month before the speed is throttle to 64kbps. So, in practice most customers would get about 250MB of usable download for $29.95, which is comparable with other offerings on the market.

Dodo is also being rather generous with the speed claim, billing it as "typically a maximum of 24Mbps." This is the theoretical maximum: a typical service will never achieve this.

Dodo's home phone plans start from $32.90 per month for line rental only. Plans including calls start from $59.90 per month for line rental and $60.00 worth of calls. However getting precise data on call rates from the Dodo website is not easy. Some plans claim caps of $1.95 on national, international and calls to mobiles, but iTWire could not locate a per minute rate or if there was a flagfall charge.

Dodo says there will be no cost for set up and installation however there will be a charge for the supply of a modem unless the customer can provide their own. For customers who cannot or do not want ADSL2+ broadband, Dodo is also offering free dial-up internet access with any of its home phone plans.

Dodo claims to be the fifth largest ISP in Australia. It employs more than 300 staff and claims more than 300,000 residential and business customers Australia-wide.