'Throttling' Broadband Provider Sued In Australia

destinyland writes "Optus has been severely throttling users who exceed a download quota, according to ZDNet — down from 100Mbps to 64Kbps — and it's drawn attention from federal regulators. Optus's ad campaign promises 'supersonic' speeds, and one technology blog notes that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission 'isn't happy about Optus' sensationalist claims, which it's sure breaches the Trade Practices Act.' Australia's trade commission called the practice 'misleading or deceptive,' and the broadband provider now has a date in court next month, the second one since a June hearing over 'unlimited' voice and data plans that actually had usage caps."

Title

[antant007]

I think the title was meant to be read "Broadband provider that throttles sued in Australia"

Throttling to 28.8 Kb/s.

[Animats]

If you don't subscribe to Optus's "premium" tiers, your service can be throttled to 28.8 Kb/s. [optus.com.au] From the Optus price list:

'yes' DSL Basic 200MB

• High Speed Data Allowance: 200MB
• Speed Limit if High Speed Data Allowance Exceeded (kbps): 28.8
• Monthly Access Fee (from 15 April 2009): $49.95

'yes' DSL Unlimited

• High Speed Data Allowance: 12 GB
• Speed Limit if High Speed Data Allowance Exceeded (kbps): 64
• Monthly Access Fee (from 15 April 2009) $91.95

Yes, they really call it "unlimited", in the same table with the limits. That table isn't easy to find. You have to go through three web pages, then download several Word documents

That's their DSL service. Their cable service has similar tiers and terms, but slightly different pricing.

Re:I see no problem with this

[commodore64_love]

I just looked up their plans. They have multiple tiers, but the AUS$60 plan allows 120GB prior to being throttled

You can buy upto 200GB if you are a heavy user (with 256k throttle when exceeded). That's still 1/3rd my full speed CATV plan and not that bad.

Re:I see no problem with this

[commodore64_love]

It wasn't advertised as such. They advertise you get 120GB for the cheapest plan and 200GB for the highest plan.

Big deal

[jewishbaconzombies]

Comcast has throttled any P2P traffic - regardless of your plan - into the ground. The FCC has told them numerous times to stop, they told the FCC to fuck off. Numerous times.

But hey - things can play out different in Oz right? Whatever keeps those delusion flags flying is fine by me.

Re:Throttling to 28.8 Kb/s.

[kaptink]

Those access fees are quite high compared to some of the competition. Possibly why they are using dishonest advertising to trick people who dont know or care that much into using them instead. Just looking at broadbandchoice.com.au shows several providers offering 150gb for $90 a month. A bit more than 12gb. Worth looking at this comparison http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/?action=search&state=any&class=0&type=res&pre=3000&cost=100&speed=512&upspeed=0&ip=1&contract=99&upfront=999999&needhw=yes&conntype=1&conntype=4&conntype=5&sort=0 [whirlpool.net.au]

Re:Wow, mods...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Dude, I had the only comment on this article for like 2 minutes and I'm the one who gets modded redundant.

a.) Another post beat yours by 2 minutes.

b.) Complaints about typos in the summary are redundant anyway. We get it, you're too smart to read something with a spelling error in it.

Re:Big deal

[David Gerard]

The ACCC are quite popular in Australia because they actually make companies behave.

They're the reason you can't enforce DVD region-locking in Australia, for example. (DVDs are still often sold region-locked, but players can play any region.)

Limited ISPs

[kangsterizer]

In germany there's an ISP called kabeldeutschland that claims 100mbit down 6mbit up (its cable + fiber behind).
Except from 6pm to 8am you get less than 1Mbit up/down on every protocol except HTTP. Everyday, no matter how much you downloaded or not (there's no download cap actually).

Quite sucky and probably borderline legal. They documents only say "up to" of course with no mention of the enforced 100k/s limit depending on the time of the day.
Their marketing material however, compares their 100mbit versus the 16Mbit of traditional DSL like the best thing since sliced bread. Except the traditional DSL provides 16Mbit on every protocol internet supports regardless of the time of the day, and is therefore much better. (and cheaper!)

Re:I see no problem with this

[theaveng]

Your numbers are out of date, and here's the latest from that website

Mbit/s
11 US/Russian Federation (tie)
10 E.U.
9 Canada
8 Australia
7 China
4 Brazil
3 Mexico

Re:ISPs, sell yourselves on _service_!

[DeadboltX]

What ever happened to not selling things you can't offer?

ISPs are a business notorious for overselling. It makes less tangible sense today, but think back 15 years ago when each customer needed a physical modem to dial in to. Now everything is digital, so they will cram as many users on the same line as they can until it stops making fiscal sense because of lost customers.

Re:ISPs, sell yourselves on _service_!

[billcopc]

"Due to the laws of physics, we aren't unlimited, but we'll do the next best thing and make it easy for you to monitor your usage and judge how much you are spending on bandwidth!"

Too many words. People are stupid. Lies work better. I go now.

Re:I see no problem with this

[rickb928]

What's this 'unlimited time' crap?

I had cable service back around 1999 and used a NetWare server as a firewall, mostly to play around with filtering ads. Since I had it on 24x7, when the cable company ran a contest and gave a t-shirt to the user with the most hours online, I won. No problem.

The second month, they gave me another t-shirt, and then asked me if I would mind if they gave a third t-shirt to some other user... Well, I said no problem.

Third month, I'm the #1 user again, and the marketing department said they had to give me the shirt or there would be trouble. That's when they asked me what I was doing online.

I told them. They were quite upset, and tried to cut my service off for some BS terms-of-service violation. I threatened to complain to the city and the state, and called their bluff. They relented, but I asked them to stop sending cheezy t-shirts. They gave up on the contest, since I only won the third time because another player/user had some downtime. I found out he was running NTAS, of course. That explains the downtime.

But despite being 'online' for 720-744 hours a month, I wasn't downloading much at all. They had a contest for that too. I ran a chron job on my firewall just to annoy them. Won that too. Novell's FTP site was also crazy fast, and they didn't notice I was downloading it a few times a day. This would not work today.

All of this to make a point. 'Time' doesn't mean anything for online usage. Many people leave their PC on all the time, and it's talking at least a little bit always. Sounds like this ISP is just weaseling the true cap, bytes, and trying not to tell anyone. Complete and utter crap. They should pay up. Pure corporate weaselry.

Re:I see no problem with this

[newDzerzhinsky]

Something DOES need to be done about the way that ISPs market themselves. I provide 2 quotes from the website of my current ISP, and ask you to guess which one is most prominently shown :) 1. "We think you deserve more. So no matter which of our fibre optic broadband packages you chose, you get unlimited downloads. That means you can download as much music, as many films and as many photos as you want without having to worry about going over any kind of limit." 2. "So to make sure that our service is fair for everybody, we sometimes moderate the speeds for the top 5% of customers who are downloading and/or uploading an unusually large amount." Lovely....So, you don't need to "worry about going over any kind of limit", but if you go over a limit, you'll get things really, really slow. It's OK. cos you can still download all you want, you'll just not be able to do it at the speed that you paid for... Gotta love that kind of doublespeak.

Re:They have 100Mbps broadband here?

[Netshroud]

Optus' 100Mbps plan is what they call the "Optus Premium Speed Pack". An extra AU$20/mo on almost any Cable plan, plus a new DOCSIS3.0 modem, and you'll be chewing through your monthly quota about 5 times as fast. Then they throttle you. If you get the more expensive Fusion plans (the 'Unlimited' ones) the throttling speed is 256kbps. They try getting away with that because 256kbps is the minimum speed to technically be 'Broadband'. ACCC, attack!

Re:They have 100Mbps broadband here?

[mjwx]

As for throttling once you've used a set amount of data, that's pretty much standard practice... it's not like they hide it.

My understanding of the complaint was not that OptArse was throttling but the way optus had advertised the service.

Throttling is standard practice, nothing you can sue about there but they have to be honest about it as you can sue for misleading advertising, which as I understand it is what the complaint is about.

It gets worse...

[bertok]

Take a look at the plans by Comcen, a smaller ISP that I'm with. Their new ADSL2+ plans throttle off-peak bandwidth down to 2Mbps all the time, even if you haven't exceeded your quota!

See the plans here [comcen.com.au]. Click a plan to get more information, where it will say "Off-Peak Speed: Speed is slowed to 2000Kbps (2Mbps) during off-peak only". All but one of the plans has a permanent throttle on night-time bandwidth.

What if you're a professional who wants to sync or back-up data to your work at night? What if you're a techo like me doing after-hours remote maintenance over a VPN? If you're with this ISP, you won't get a choice, you'll be throttled, even if your physical link can do over ten megabits!

Re:I see no problem with this

[euphemistic]

I'm going to clarify what the word "unlimited" means in this context (regardless of how it's complete bullshit).

On an "unlimited" plan, you get for example 50 gig. This 50 gig is at the maximum (theoretically) speed allowed by that plan by the ISP. Should you exceed that 50gig, your speed gets throttled down (or "shaped" to use the weasel word). You still can use your connection to do whatever you want, and for no extra charge, it's just that it's practically near impossible to actually do so when your speeds are cut to nearly nothing. They claim it is "shaped" to dialup speeds of 64kbps, but at least on my plan that is never really the case and I'm lucky to get 15.

That's what unlimited means, theoretically infinite amounts of data, but only 50gigs of that is at the speeds associated with how fast the technology allows. Nothing to do with time or anything like that.

Where optus has run into problems is not with the term "unlimited", it's a pretty common term thrown about by ISPs in Australia. The only problem they ran into is by claiming the speeds are "supersonic" indicating they're superfast, when, if you're throttled, they're nothing of the kind. That's it, that's the entire story.