Why don't they just make their data plan overage the same rate as the the plan itself ($30/1GB = .03/MB overage fees). Hell it even happens in canada.
The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
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Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#12I registered a complaint with the ACCC with this a few years ago - they kept it on file, but couldn't really do much until there was a flood over epic bills (and they admitted it was hard for them to understand what the likelihood of this sort of thing happening, but they did appreciate it was unsavoury).
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#13ya know, I'd love to read the article except the sites page contrast makes the site almost unreadable.
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#14Why don't they just make their data plan overage the same rate as the the plan itself ($30/1GB = .03/MB overage fees). Hell it even happens in canada.
The stated reason? Because they can do it more cheaply if they know how much capacity they budget for up-front. It's the same reason plan minutes are so much cheaper than overage minutes.
Of course, I can't even imagine how that would account for a factor of ten (the lowest on the list), much less 140.
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#15Imagine if this was combined with the iPhone worm from a few months back. It'd essenially pingflood all phones exposed on the telco networks and screw thousands of people in excess changes without them even knowing something was going on. This worries me greatly. (puts iPhone on WiFi mode)
I didn't put this in the blog post, but hypothetically speaking you would not even need a worm. A person would need an ISP account where you don't get limited on uploads (like Internode, or most non-Australian ISPs, for instance.) A person would need to spoof the ping return address, so the ping never comes back to them. Or spoof a UDP stream where the ICMP port unreachable never comes back (or don't spoof it, and pu…
if that happened they probably have to fix the problem ;-)
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#16I just buy prepaid Internet. If I use too much data, all they know is that some guy with cash used up his quota.
(I would like to do this in the US, but nobody will sell me prepaid 3G or WiMax.)
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#17ya know, I'd love to read the article except the sites page contrast makes the site almost unreadable.
I really recommend you to get the Readability bookmarklet from Arc90: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
I don't use it that often, but when I do, it works great!
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#18ya know, I'd love to read the article except the sites page contrast makes the site almost unreadable.
I really recommend you to get the Readability bookmarklet from Arc90: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ I don't use it that often, but when I do, it works great!
Plus: it is awesome when you want to print an article - and not all the ads & navig surrounding it !
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#19The price and quality of communications in Australia is absolutely ridiculous. I mostly blame the monopoly/biopoly (Telstra and somewhat Optus) but the competitors aren't much better either. It's also just going to get worse with the new "cleanfeed".
It certainly is. When we moved from Aus to Europe, we shopped around for broadband plans and I kept asking what the download limit was. Lots of blank looks. I used to have a 30GB/month plan in Aus. They don't have limits here.
In fairness, Europe and US have large populations accessing data over many links, so the cost is spread wide. Australia accesses much US data over few links and must bear the cost of that. Data is simply more expensive in Australia.
The telco's have probably had discussions on how to make local data not part of a cap, but it would be too hard to explain to normal people how to ensure that the data is locally hosted.
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#20And that is why I don't want to have mobile internet.
Internet usage doesn't have a cap on it - it is either pay a flat fee for free usage (even if my usage is 100% every single day) or the $0.10/GB that appspot charges.