Xtra is FINALLY giving us what we want!

Chief Snake · **Posted:** November 7th, 2006, 3:15 am

Xtra is the leading ISP over in New Zealand and for the past... I don't know how long... it has been the worst, by far.
Our current plan at $50 NZD per month ($33.50 USD) is for the max possible download speed over here (3.5mbps), 128kbps upload, and 5GB of bandwidth. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this plan is crap, as most other ISPs provide the same specs for a fair amount less.

Recently, Xtra changed all its plans to max download speed, to rival another ISP (which was still doing better), but it looks like they took the hint and went a step further.
The $50 plan, and only that plan, now has unlimited bandwidth instead of 5GB. Basically, this makes it the best plan on offer if you don't care about upload speed, because no other commonly known ISP in New Zealand offers a plan with unlimited bandwidth.
There was some tweaking of a few other plans, but they all still suck.

http://jetstream.xtra.co.nz/chm/0,8763, ... html?nv=sd

The only real catch on it, which is easy to avoid:

www.xtra.co.nz wrote:

If in a single day you use more than 700MB of data during the peak hours of 4pm to 12am (midnight) then we'll get in touch with some advice on how to reduce your usage. If your usage continues to be very high, then you may become subject to our Fair Use Policy.

Adbot · **Posted:** November 7th, 2006, 3:15 am

Crysala · **Posted:** November 7th, 2006, 4:36 am

These kinds of plans have tons of faults. We have an "Unlimited" plan, I think its somewhere in the $100 per month, but after we use up 10GB of bandwith at broadband speed our download speed gets slowed to 64bps. How is that unlimited? You cant download anything at that speed, everything is incredibly slow, thats almost freaking dial-up.

Internet providers are total rip offs.

The Haysta · **Posted:** November 7th, 2006, 12:01 pm

Just to put it into perspective, we have the same speed as third world countries.

Chief Snake · **Posted:** November 7th, 2006, 8:25 pm

Crysala wrote:

These kinds of plans have tons of faults. We have an "Unlimited" plan, I think its somewhere in the $100 per month, but after we use up 10GB of bandwith at broadband speed our download speed gets slowed to 64bps. How is that unlimited? You cant download anything at that speed, everything is incredibly slow, thats almost freaking dial-up.

That's the same thing with most of Xtra's plans, only they don't call them unlimited. They're just flat rate, where after you go over the limit they throttle you back to virtually dialup speed.

Jeff · **Posted:** November 7th, 2006, 9:03 pm

I can't believe ISPs are still ripping people off with "bandwidth" limitation, which is just plain bull.

I'm lucky to live in the Silicon Valley where Internet is affordable with good features. We're only paying 17 bucks a month for 3008kbps and 512kbps upload.

Chief Snake · **Posted:** November 8th, 2006, 3:13 am

Yeah. Here's hoping the other ISPs will follow suit, and do a better job. Unfortunately we can't switch anytime soon because my Dad can't abandon his email account...

Adbot · **Posted:** November 8th, 2006, 3:13 am