Optus this morning announced its consumer plans for accessing the National Broadband Network (NBN). It joins Exetel, iiNet and Internode in offering NBN services, but how do its prices stack up? The hardware is free, which is nice, but there are some fiddly rules around peak and off-peak usage.
Picture by Alpha
Optus is offering seven plans in total, with a mixture of standalone and bundled packages. The cheapest plan is $39.99 a month for 40GB a month at 12Mbps download/1Mbps upload, split into 20GB peak and off-peak. If you exceed either cap, you’ll be shaped to 256Kbps. You can only sign up to this plan if you have a post-paid mobile contract priced at $19 a month or more. This is one of the cheaper plans on the market, but Exetel still undercuts it.
All other plans run at 25Mbps download/5Mbps upload. $59.99 gets you 120GB (divided into 50GB peak and 70GB off-peak), $69.99 scores 150GB (75GB each for peak and off-peak) and $79.99 gets you 500GB (250GB each for peak and off-peak). These plans drop in cost by $10 a month if you’re also an Optus mobile customer, and also get shaped to 256Kbps once you exceed either peak.
If you want bundled services, the $109 ‘yes’ Fusion plan includes 500GB of data, and the $129 plan includes 1000GB (both have no peak/off-peak distinction and unlimited calls to Australian numbers). The cheaper $64.94 120GB Home Phone Bundle is also offered, with 50GB peak and 70GB off-peak, plus $30 of call credit. Once again, you get shaped to 256Kbps once you’ve exceeded your quota.
Across all plans, you can pay an extra $10 a month to upgrade to 50/20, or $20 to upgrade to 100/40. (Optus doesn’t actually describe the exact speeds in its announcement, but I’ve confirmed those speeds with the company.)
All Optus plans can be signed up for on a month-to-month basis, though I’m guessing contract enforcement will come when the NBN is more widespread. What does look like good value is the inclusion of a free Wi-Fi gateway to access the service, which is supplied and installed free even if you go with the month-to-month option. (The free installation deal runs out on January 12 2012.)
The plans will be available at the currently-active mainland NBN sites from November 21 (which suggests Tasmania is being left out for now). What’s your take on Optus’ pricing? Tell us in the comments.
Dan Miller
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 7:51 AMWhy do they still have on peak off peak data limits? I all ready am on the $129 fusion 1TB plan with their super sonic pack. But I must say once the NBN comes my way I will not be going with Optus.
Aaron
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 8:17 AMI really hope one ISP (probably TPG) starts making better plans that don’t offer such crappy shaping speeds, peak/off-peak limits and such low quota allowances …once one does the rest will have to respond with something a bit more reasonable
wsDK_II
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 9:10 AMTelstra will not have peak / off peak plans.
ill be going with them :)
Matt
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 9:27 AMTPG is able to offer such low prices due to the way they run their network, they operate at such a high contention ratio in comparison to other networks which is why people often experience terrible quality service, thus goes the old saying – you get what you pay for.
People are afraid to spend a little extra money to assure quality of service for their connection, I work for an ISP and it’s truly a joke that so many businesses refuse to pay for a business grade connection and stay with their 10gb p/month residential connection, but complain when there’s a minute of downtime.
Azza
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 10:24 AMTo be honest I’ve been with TPG for 6 months and it has been flawless service so far. Especially compared to Telstra and Optus.
Matt
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 10:49 AMI’d be willing to bet an arm and a leg that your speeds drop by 50% when it hits 5-10pm.
Andrew
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 12:49 PMMost small businesses with a cheap TPG ADSL connection would not care about speed dropping after 5pm
Matt
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 1:51 PMI was making two different points, businesses care about the service going down during the day which can happen to anyone and everyone, it’s about the SLA that comes with your contract that people won’t put in the extra money for.
If you’re a business and you buy a residential plan and the SLA states that it can take 4-6 hours to get your internet back up, don’t come crying when it’s down for 5 minutes.
DansDans
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 3:52 PMPlease send me your arms and legs – my speeds never drop after 5pm – consistant all day long
Wise to know what your talking about before shooting off your mouth
Matt
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 8:26 AMAnd after 6pm AEST, Optus will throttle all traffic bandwidth and it will slow back down to modem speeds. Don’t bother calling Optus support as they will say its a problem on your end.
Read whirlpool.net.au to find out what’s really happening.
Matt
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 9:29 AMThey don’t throttle, 6pm is the peak time of day people are using their internet – the pipes get full due to so many connections thus the slow speeds for everyone.
It is Optus’s fault though for not upgrading their pipes to allow more bandwidth.
Sam
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 8:59 AMim with matt..
have fun playing WoW at 4,000 ms ping…
buffering a 5 minute youtube clip for 10 minutes so you can watch it…
Xeryus
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 9:45 AMI’m with optus in west Brisbane,and i have yet to experience the slow down thats written about in whirlpool forum, i speedtest, download, pingtest, youtube during 6pm-10pm and nothing , i speedtest to US day or night and its always 155-185ms. no doubt there is a problem, but its not optus wide as i cant experience it and others also, but pointless posting on whirlpool, just get attacked.
Xeryus
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 9:45 AMback on track tho, not overly pleased by these plans.
krow
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 9:51 AMI’d like to know why Australia remains one of the few countries who curb usage via data use. Wasnt the whole point of this NBN to increase access to information and services? How are we supposed to utilise a network while constantly checking our usage? .. its an absolute joke
Matt
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 10:22 AMBecause Data usage makes more sense, pay what you use – not run out of cap because I accidentally left my modem on even though no one is using it.
jeremy
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 11:30 AMIn a word, peering to the USA, which is expensive due to the distances involved and certain structural issues (basically we are at the very end of the pipes and pay for gross transfer in/out, US carriers pay for net “in” transfer on what is largely “domestic” traffic). Europe is different because traffic is contained locally due to languange barriers or is part of cheap net transfer via fat atlantic links. Major countries in Asia are on shorter pipes and have very high domestic traffic (eg Japan/Korea + China). We use too much (expensive) USA bandwidth, perhaps 80%, of which perhaps half is cached forward by an expensive monopoly CDN that the ACCC has not even bothered to examine (because they are fools …)
Calvin Lichty
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 9:53 AMSo are these confirmed, guaranteed, you’ll-always-get-this speeds? I’m just wondering why I should even consider switching to this?
I’m with Optus on the 500GB month-to-month Cable internet plan paying 72 bucks a month and already get 18Mbps according to Speedtest (when using a server located in Australia of course).
The only upside I see when comparing my cable connection to this is the dramatic increase in upload speed. Currently I’m able to eek out 512kbps but I’m not really seeing the benefits of such an increase in upload bandwidth when I’m not really uploading all that much in the first place.
Labrys
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 10:49 AMFrom my understanding NBN speeds are actual speeds not like the current ADSL and Cable speeds. E.g. my ADSL2+ 3Mbps speed.
jeremy
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 11:47 AMnope, the NBN speeds are burst speeds. Contention still applies during peak times and will depend on you ISP – the pipes that connect the POPs to the ISP backbone are still the responsibility of the ISP and will generally be less than the sum of bandwith in the POP. Your ISP uses one of two ways to plan this – contention (say 16:1, which means pipe = 1/16 of the sum) or average at peak (say 1mbps average per user), which amount to much the same thing. Business links will get better backhaul most likely, as they do today. Only Telstra have really awesome cheap backhaul everywhere, something thier competitors are trying to get “regulated” for obvious selfish reasons. Note : the Testra backhaul was not built “with public money”, even if the bottom feeders say it was – it was built with borrowings that are on Telstra balence sheet as a public company. Even the last mile copper and ducts Telstra had to “buy” during its privatisation by paying excessive “dividends” to the govt.
Ruen
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 11:00 AMwow. . . you’re honestly telling me they shunning the state the whole NBN rollout started. . . Most likely to release a different ‘Tasmania only’ pricing plan where all the data packs are 20/40GB less and cost $50 more. . .
jeremy
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 11:53 AMyup thier tassie political stunt was never sustainable – the links to and around tassie are expensive per head and the last mile costs a bomb due to lack of critical density. NBN makes these things more obvious, not less – 99% of tassie traffic has to peer to the mainland, because even aussie servers (eg ISP mail, google etc) are most on the other side of the ditch :-)
Ruen
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 12:06 PMOh believe me I always knew it was a stunt and a pretty stupid one at that. Once the rollout begins picking up speed on the mainland I can see the rollout stages in Tassie becoming few and far between. The likely scenario being Tasmania as the first to start and last to finish.
Dr Doom
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 12:20 PMThe current Optus plans are cheaper. Im on their fusion plan now and pay $69.95 for 1000Gb at a theoretical speed of 100mgb, actually achieving 80mgb per second.
These plans suck.