Who here agrees that the Government should do something to make our internet fair like in the USA?
I think we should not have to pay for downloads, but instead pay for speed like they do in the USA. I was looking at these outrageous new NBN Plans, the Government is paying for the roll out yet ISP's are giving out small quota's like 60GB which can be burnt through in a matter of less than one hour.
I think all ISP's need to follow TPG's lead with Unlimited 24/7 internet. Although they have not activated it at all their exchanges, there other plans are still acceptable I am on the 200GB plan with 2Mbps throttle and manage to run back ups to my work server, which can range from 300-700GB in any given month.

So do you agree that ISP's should be forced to offer unlimited internet?

I honestly don't think it'd work economically. Australia's bandwidth issue is primarily due to our general lack of undersea cables connecting us to the rest of the world. Most traffic within the US is domestic, they don't have quite the same problems as we do with getting new cable put out if and when needed. Undersea cable is just that expensive, and it'd take a lot of time to earn back the investment on it with falling costs of bandwidth overseas.

Most ISP's DO already offer unlimited, you just have to phone them and they can arrange it, generally they make it available under Business grade plans (which you will pay through the nose for) You will notice that unlimited is fairly limited location wise, this is because there are VERY FEW places where the backhaul charges are low enough to squeeze out a profit, even so, it's always a gamble as to how much data the user will go through.

Okay so we are talking about GIGABYTES not GIGABITS just to make things clear.

The main problem is BACKHAUL is FREEEEEKING expensive in Australia.

I seriously doubt very much your home connection could actually burn through 60GB in 1 hour.

Also, What the hell are you going to burn through 60GB's per hour, every day of the month on? Over 43TB per month? Seeing how, an ADSL2+ connection running 24x7 at 24MBps for 30 days will get you at about the 7.5TB mark, you would need 6 x ADSL2+ connections to achieve your projected 60GB per hour per day for a whole month (roughly 43TB) lets say they set the unlimited accounts at a crazy $500 per month, and you wish to get your moneys worth so you download your full 7.5TB (fsm knows where you store this data, but I digress) now lets say that your exchange happens to only have telstra Backhaul, which is about 35c per gigabyte, then you have data TO the isp from the world, which is about the same, this means you just cost your ISP $5250 to provide you with your completely unlimited ADSL2+ connection which you will use at MAXIMUM speed all day long.

These data figures would be roughly acurate for a 25Mbps home NBN connection, however the backhaul price is not public available so the calculations are based on current connections, if you take away the total cost of telstra from the equasion, you are still looking at a $2625 bill for data that your ISP would need to pay for you to download at maximum speed 24x7, plus the lease cost of the ISP utilizing the NBN connection to your house (whatever that is) plus their staff's wages

This is why nobody offers it, because you might as well install fiber, at GREAT cost, at which point you need to speak to UECOMM or another company that offers Fibre to your residence (say hello to a $20,000 bill, if your extremely LUCKY for installation).

I think you need to do some optimizing of your backup routines, and procedures. If your backup is running through 23GB per day (at a projected 700GB per 30 days) I would have to ask you what kind of business you were in, and whether this was a full backup or an incremental backup, whether you have considered Data de-duplication? If your business is outputting this much data per day of legitimate documents that has been de-duplicated and this is purely an incremental backup, then your company needs to spend some SERIOUS dollars on a better backup system than just punting the files off to your house...

As an indication of how much data that legitimate businesses use, like a bank, our entire database is about 3GB and that contains 11,000 members banking data for the last 6 years... our windows file-shares containing loan documentation and every fax ever sent/received is about 100GB, which contains all the data from the last 4 years.

I guess what I am really saying, is that if you have a company that is generating so much business that it is creating an extra income of 23GB of data into it's computer system almost EVERY day, then it needs to seriously think about spending some SERIOUS money on IT and backup procedures.

One flaw in your argument, ISP's who buy bandwidth pay for speed not usage, I am not talking about telstra, as I do not know their whole sale pricing, how ever I do know other companies who peer with smaller ISP's like TPG, charge per Gbps of bandwith, but I am saying for the NBN, the GOV, paid for all the blackhauls and backbones. So there should be plenty of bandwith to provide us with unlimited plans. 100mbps up and 100mbps down unlimited would be the dream, but I would settle for unlimited 100down and 25 up. Don't mind paying around $120 for that. Otherwise looks like I will have to keep an ADSL 2+ connection and a NBN connection, One for downloading ADSL2+ and NBN for web browsing and gaming.

If an ISP advertises "Unlimited" then their users should be allowed to consume as much bandwidth as they possibly can. We don't want our system to end up like America where customers on unlimited plans get throttled for downloading too much data. In my opinion it is fraud to limit a customer after selling them unlimited and any company that does it should be liquidated without second chance (mistakes and tech errors excluded). ISPs need to be common carriers they should only limit you if you go over your allotted bandwidth stated in your contract.

One reason bandwidth is expensive here is because we have huge distances to cover and a small population to pay for it. Not only do we have an expansive landmass between East and West but we also have allot of distance to travel under the sea before we connect to the rest of the world.

I believe the precedent had been set with Telstra's now-'Liberty' plans. File a complaint with ACCC if you have an issue with usage of 'unlimited' terms.

ISPs should not be forced to (well they already do, just costs a fortune) in my opinion, because it would invite abuse which would damage the viability of (cheap) unlimited plans the moment they were made available.
If you really are going to download so much you need unlimited, then you are just going to have to pay for the service you want, just as is normal for any other superior quality service.

I think the point is that if someone offers a plan marked unlimited, then the plan should be unlimited, otherwise the plan should be marketed as having the actual limit, also in a case similar familiar to exetel subscribers, you should be actually able to use the usage listed on your contract.

Ok so here's the way the pricing breaks down in aus compared to the states

As an ISP you need to pay for the following on a monthly basis:

-AGVC (your transit between your equipment and your dsl tails) Common providers are iSeek
-Transit (your connection between your equipment and the internet) Common providers are Pipe, Vocus
-AGVC interconnect (the piece of fibre between your equipment and your AGVC provider
-Transit Interconnect (the piece of fibre between your equipment and your transit provider)
-Staff to manage the equipment but i'm not going to cover this here
and still try and make money

In Australia the Breakdown cost wise is: (obviously these prices go down with bulk - but it's only 50% or so)
-AGVC - approximately 150$/Mbit per month ex tax
-Transit - approximately 180$/Mbit per month ex tax
-Interconnects - approximately 120$ each
So in raw costs to provide you with an uncontended full DSL2+ connection $8160 ex tax

In the states:
-AGVC - approximately 40$/Mbit per month
-Transit - approximately 40$/Mbit per month
-Interconnects - approximately 120$ each
So in raw costs to provide you with an uncontended full DSL2+ connection: $2160

Most ISPs overcontend their transit since not everyone is using their full connection at any one time, nor can all people obtain full dsl2+ speeds. The normal ratio for this is 20:1 (ie you put 20 people onto the transit/AGVC you'd purchase for 1 connection)

So in a 20:1 overconteded world:
USA: $108
Australia: $408

So yea .. we are really difficult to compare to the states. our isps's are doing the best they can for the moment.

Technically speaking 90% of ADSL plans ARE UNLIMITED, they are just slowed down after a certain point.

The fact remains that true unlimited IS available from most ISP's, which makes your original point invalid, you would be forcing ISP's to do something that they already do.

You just don't want to pay that cost, and nobody can provide it to you for as cheap as you think unlimited is worth, our systems (as a country) are simply not capable of providing that much bandwidth to every person in every house that can get broadband, there would be massive bottlenecks, which is why true unlimited plans have a premium, this is to limit the amount of users who use it so as not to choke the whole system, and the basic costs of that are about $408 as stated above in that very comprehensive post.

The average user of adsl barely uses more than 10 to 20gb per month, hell the average home user I visit to fix their computer barely breaks the 2GB mark, this will increase over time for sure, but we are hardly being choked to death by small data plans.

When I was running a small data-center we had 20mb/20mb fiber with 1:1 contention ratio, from UECOMM with true unlimited bandwidth, it cost about $30,000 to install (luckily it was already in our street) and it cost us about $7,000 per month for 20/20 unlimited data at 1:1.

Perhaps you are expecting too much from your home internet connection, and you do not have to budget to afford unlimited internet at your house, have you considered backing up to a tape/hdd each night and carrying it home every day, max it would take you is about 30 minutes to make an incremental backup like that to an LTO tape or even a regular esata external drive.