Go back in time about a dozen years, & the immense majority of Australian Web users were on dialup. Speeds, to put it kindly, weren't great, but they were at least (largely) removed from the period where ISPs gave you a set number of hours of dialup time. You might be disconnected at "peak times" if you'd been connected for long -- or if a random seagull landed on a line somewhere, or something -- but you could, for the most part, download as much as your poky 56kbps connection could handle.
These days, the immense majority of Web users in Australia are on a broadband connection of some kind, but (again, with positive exceptions) those designs are limited by the quantity of knowledge you are allowed to shift around. Downloads is not the right word there; the immense majority of designs count any knowledge you upload against your quota. This makes picking a plan with knowledge a vital consideration. Select small & you'll either pay hefty excess fees (for mobile broadband) or get formed down to speeds last seen in the dialup period. Select much, & you are paying for knowledge you'll never use.
How much knowledge does the average Australian use, anyway? The latest figures from the Australian Communications & Media Authority (ACMA) paint a fascinating picture. Its latest document suggests that in the December 2010 quarter, the average fixed line (that is ADSL, ADSL2+ & Cable) connection downloaded 18.8GB of data; that is a small over 6GB per month for the quarter. Switch to a mobile broadband service & the figures tumble down to around half a gigabyte per month. Whether that is to do with the higher cost of mobile broadband or its sometimes spotty availability is hard to say, but I'd bet more on the former case.
That is a whole lot of streaming video, or in case you are feeling uncharitable, plenty of Torrente episodes of Top Gear, & without a doubt there is edge cases on both sides of the equation; those folks who consistently use their whole immense quota each month, & those who only scrape through on a few megabytes here & there. The latter case customers are the ones that ISPs love, incidentally, as they are both far more profitable & less hassle. If every user tried to access their full knowledge quota each & every month, most ISPs would fundamentally collapse; like mobile telephony it is built on a slightly oversold premise.
The broadband usage figures are fascinating, but what is their take-home value? Most ISPs will let you view a rough breakdown of your ongoing figures, & in case you are paying for a connection you barely touch the edges of, it is well worth examining in case you can switch down a pricing tier. That 6GB per month figure looks like a lovely base point to grow up from, bearing in mind that vital upgrades such as operating process patches & Antivirus program signature upgrades can fundamentally eat up a few GB each month by themselves if things get busy. That is without ever touching a single Web page, & as I have covered before, it'd be a bad idea to leave your PC unpatched & unprotected.
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