There may be some good news on that front, here's a snip from the nz herald
article -

"Howard said the discount extended to Telecom's high- speed internet service
JetStream, which TelstraClear and a number of internet providers already
resell but at a tiny margin.

TelstraClear was looking to next year's local loop unbundling review to
deliver a better deal for wholesaling high-speed internet services."

Full link is here
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3007038&thesection=techno
logy&thesubsection=general

Hopefully this will mean that ISP's can now re-sell ADSL services with more
options. I'm suprised it's taken this long for it to even be on the cards.
Telecom have an awful anti-competitive monopoly on ADSL offerings which some
would argue has made broadband via telecom's adsl fairly un-attractive. I'm
sure everyone would agree that per megabyte charges in new zealand are some
of the highest in the world over telecom's ADSL (and insult to injury they
don't count national/international traffic seperately).

In aussie where a similar thing was done, they now have an enourmous amount
of ISP's and speed plans/caps/charges to choose from. As said ISPs can
offers flat rate in the sense it was being talked about here, flat rate not
meaning all you can download, but meaning one fixed price per month (data
limits hit for the month, then speed cap comes into play). Some even offer
12am to 7pm 'free' downloads at full speed. Others have strict data caps,
but have giant ftp mirrors of just about everything that would cause big
downloads.

It will be interesting to see how things pan out here in nz if it happens.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Phillips" <steve@focb.iconz.co.nz>
To: "Peter Gutmann" <pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz>; <adsl@lists.unixathome.org>
Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 5:23 PM
Subject: Re: Soft caps on ADSL plans

> In new zealand it is "technically" impossible as telecom control the rate
> limits and they refuse to allow anything other than full rate (they
collect
> the $$ so the isp has no control) and 128k (they control the rate limit so
> the isp has no control)
>
> --
> Steve.
>
> At 17:08 2/12/2002, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> >A while back I suggested ADSL plans with soft caps, falling to
rate-limited
> >plans once you exceed a given limit, and someone said this was impossible
to
> >do for technical reasons. This is recently been discussed on the
vuln-dev
> >list, where someone said:
> >
> >-- Snip --
> >
> >Telcos in .au are starting to introduce plans (optus@home cable, iinet
> >adsl etc) whereby you get a monthly cap that's soft; at the time the cap
> >is reached, the rate is limited (either severely or lightly, depending
> >on the quality of the plan) and no excess data charges are inflicted
> >upon the user.
> >
> >This technology is definately possible, and the plans look extremely
> >inviting because of this. Especially since a growing number of them are
> >also allowing the running of services (previously almost unheard of on
> >flat rate plans.).
> >
> >-- Snip --
> >
> >There were followups saying it was being done in the US as well. Are
they
> >using different technology than here, or was the "technical reasons"
thing
> >just a convenient excuse?
> >
> >Peter.

-- 
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