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Survey: Are you on the right broadband plan?

Shows about 40 per cent of local broadband users should consider upgrading their plan

Compare Broadband claims 38.5 per cent of Australian broadband users should consider upgrading their plan, according to a survey conducted by the company.

The broadband comparison website polled 447 respondents on their monthly usage habits.

The results also showed 19.5 per cent of respondents use about three-quarters of their allocated data, 13.4 per cent use about half their quota, 16.6 per cent use a quarter of their data and just 12 per cent did not know how much of their date they used.

According to Compare Broadband, the findings suggest Australian households keep track of their data usage.

With applications such as YouTube, Internet TV and video calling becoming more utilised and ADSL2+ becoming available in more areas, Internet activity has been increasing yearly.

Figures from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) showed there were nearly 10.4 million active Internet subscribers using fixed and mobile wireless services in December 2010.

On average, 18.8GB of data was downloaded per Internet subscriber during the December quarter of 2010, as compared to 14.6GB downloaded during the same quarter in 2009. With online habits evolving, many broadband customers may find their current plan insufficient for their needs. Compare Broadband general manager, Scott Kennedy, said broadband providers may not call to tell users about a better plan as they usually leave it up to the customer to ask. "If your current broadband provider cannot offer you a better deal, shop around and you could find a plan with more data, for a better price," he added.

In response to the trend for higher data plans, several Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have released unlimited and terabyte plans over the last year.

TPG, iiNet, iPrimus, Dodo and Internode all now offer plans with 1000GB or more.

Nominations for the 2012 ARN IT Industry Awards open on Tuesday, June 12.

References show all

Comments

1

Hydrans

Tue 12/07/2011 - 09:43

The average internet subscriber used therefore under 6.5Gb download per month, is it really necessary to offer 150x times the average then. What are people going to do with this additional download quantity?

2

Jesse

Tue 12/07/2011 - 13:37

To "Hydrans", No, the average amount of downloads per month has increased from 14.6GB to 18.8GB. However, you are correct when it comes to the average user. People like big numbers, and "unlimited" always sounds enticing. Some people do use hundreds of GB of data, so it is a useful option, but yes, for the majority of us a 50GB plan should suffice.

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Tags: Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), Compare Broadband, dodo, iinet, internet tv, internode, iprimus, ISPs, telcos, telecommunications, telecoms, youtube
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