Optus Doubles Cable Speed with a Twist
Optus Doubles Cable Speed with a Twist
December 17, 2007: Australia’s second largest telecommunications company has announced it will more then double the maximum speed it offers on its broadband network, which is good news for fusion users but not so good for the old school.
Optus Cable users in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane will be able to indulge in a greatly increased internet connection thanks to today’s announcement, with the previous maximum speed of 8mbps being more then doubled to 20mbps. The announcement is a major bonus for existing MyHome and Fusion Cable customers, although it’s not so great for those customers on older plans.
“Optus is not charging its customers a premium to receive this additional speed with existing and new customers experiencing the upgrade automatically.” said Michael Smith, Group Marketing Director, Optus.
Those existing customers who are on older, better value plans are being told that they will have to migrate to the new plans in order to access the speed boost. While this may seem like not much of a big deal, in reality customers on plans which allow you to download 20GB in peak times and 40GB in off-peak times would be forced onto a plan with only a 30GB any time download limit.
“We're not telling customers on the legacy plan they have to migrate, but if they want the 20mb/sec speeds plans they can move across to the MyHome or Fusion plans to access those speeds" said an Optus spokesperson.
Another rub to the plan switch is upload speed, which Optus now counts upload data with downloaded data in its new plans, which it did not count in the older plans. Uploads are always occurring on your internet connection, from sending a request to a website for it to transmit that data to your browser to emails and instant messaging conversation. Until recently, most internet providers didn’t count uploads in data allowances as it isn’t very expensive for them but counting uploads means users burn through their allowances faster.