Down here in Australia, we are subject to awful prices on our telecommunications technology like mobile (cell) phones and broadband. If it weren’t for Comcast introducing their 250GB cap in October last year, I doubt many Americans would know the meaning of a broadband cap.

Telstra is the largest telco in Australia, and owns the majority of copper phone line in the country. Many Australians assume Telstra is the only choice as a broadband provider, as they own the phone lines and run lots of pretty TV ads. Thus, Telstra has been able to exploit their brand image by charging their customers obscene amounts for their internet access – customers who either don’t know about the competitors supplying ADSL, or are locked into 2 year contracts with Telstra.

Here is an example of one of Telstra’s price tiers for ADSL2+ (20Mbps theoretical maximum): $69.95 / per month, which is roughly 45 USD. Seems expensive, but that’s not all. This plan has a download cap/limit of 600 megabytes! So what happens if you go over this limit? Telstra charges you an extra 15 cents per megabyte, which equates to $150 per gigabyte! (96 USD as of 24/02/09).

My grandparents related a cautionary tale to me about how their neighbour’s nephew stayed over for the weekend and racked up a monthly Telstra broadband bill in the thousands. I told them not to worry, I know a thing or two about the internet.

broadbandchoice.com.au is an excellent impartial website which gives comparisons and returns results based on search criteria for broadband plans in Australia. You’d have to be crazy to pick Telstra for your internet access after visiting that site.

My plan, while not the best now, was the best I could get in my area for ADSL2+ some time last year. It gives me 15GB/month plus 30GB/month in the times between 2am and 12 midday. When going over either of those limits, my internet speed is slowed to a slightly-better-than-dialup speed of 64Kbps – or rather, it is supposed to be.

I replaced the modem that my internet provider sent in the mail (Linksys AM300) with a Speedtouch 536, connected to a Linksys WRT54G which handles the PPPoE authentication and provides wireless and NAT functions. It seems that this combination has somehow thwarted my ISP’s attempts at slowing down my internet access speed, as I have exceeded my limit the last 2 months but did not get slowed down.

My theory is that the modem needs to reconnect to the ISP for the slower connection to be established, but maybe since I am not using the stock modem, my ISP cannot remotely reset the modem and force a reconnection. So I guess I have unlimited downloads now? (as long as there’s no blackouts) Pwn’d.