You may have noticed the ads for Telecom Big Time on TV recently. Flat rate! No Caps! Traffic Managed! uh oh.
First off, flat rate never ever works for long. Second, Traffic Management is never a good thing. It is normally sold as keeping it fair for everyone and only affecting those dastardly pirates. In reality in usually means making everyone suffer.
I had a colleague at work switch to Big Time. He had nothing but positive things to say. Slow to 200k from 5PM-12AM, but then full rate, perfectly usable during the day etc. He had pulled down something like 100 gig in a week or so. He also said that his SSL usenet downloads were unaffected. As I had recently hit my 40 Gig cap on my Telecom Pro plan, I thought I would give it a go.
One point: no static IPs on Big Time!
I filled out the online form (hooray for not having to call!) and the next day I was on Big Time. I did a speed test at 8:00AM that morning and I got ok speeds (8Mb down, 0.6 up) which were below my previously plan speeds (12Mb down, 1.4 up). I left for work excited at the prospect of massive downloads. Getting home that evening I fired up a few downloads using Free Download Manager, a multi part download tool. My speeds hit around 900k down using HTTP and HTTPS. Fantastic!
Youtube videos also loaded really quickly. Apparently due to some fancy caching going on at Telecom’s end.
However, about half an hour later bad things started to happen.
- My downloads slowed to 100k, then 60k.
- I started having problems with my download accelerator. Somehow the HTTP/S traffic was being mangled to the point that my app was reporting that the server didn’t support resuming downloads, which meant no multi part downloads.
- Single stream downloads would range from about 150k to an awesome 3k/sec. This is regardless of protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) or source (US, NZ)
- The same single stream downloads would periodically stop completely. Couple with the HTTP mangling meant no resuming.
In short, my internet connection was an inconsistent, unpredictable pile of shit. Some examples:
- My stepson jumped on to play Battlefield Heroes. A new version was released so we left it to download. It took over 5 hours.
- I went to Windows Update my laptop, 186MB of updates (Office 2007 SP2) took over 2 hours.
- My wife’s VPN connection dropped every 10 minutes.
Long story short, I changed plan on the 21st of October. I changed back on the 26th. I would rather pay the extra 2c a MB than sit with this pathetic excuse for an internet connection.
To be fair, I did download 30GB of stuff over the 4 or 5 days I was on this plan. Also Telecom were very prompt with changing me back and forth. It is great to be able to do this all online without having to call them.
In conclusion, Big Time delivers exactly what you expect from a traffic shaped flat rate service. terrible, terrible performance.