Out of GB (again)

[laura_seabrook]

It seems I've mismanaged my broadband for the 2nd month running. I have 50GB of broadband a month before I get "shaped" which is going down to dial-up speeds. Had a lot of downloads this month, including snapshots from a webcomic project, and I ave 2.65GB left for the next five days. I need to finish the webcomic scene so some of that will be be used today, and I can still access the net at the university, so I can upload comic pages if I time this right, so I will be online this Friday (2 days time) but otherwise offline until the 2nd.

Need to manage things better than this. I discovered one source of excess usage was reinstalling second life viewers, and forgetting to swap snapshots from PNG to JPG format. That's a difference of 1.2 MB vs 180 KB! a shot. I did over 80 snapshots yesterday, so it all adds up.

Comments

[cmcmck]

My ISP provides unlimited broadband. Wouldn't you be better off with such a deal?

[laura_seabrook]

The question is whether I could afford it.

[gwendraith]

As cmcmck said wouldn't you be better off with an unlimited package? There's good deals everywhere now.

[laura_seabrook]

What what deal, from who? I'm in Australia and the government is rolling out the "National Broadband Network" which promises to be 100 times faster. But at what price?

[gwendraith]

Have you compared what you what and if it's available at a price you can afford?

http://broadbandguide.com.au/plans

[laura_seabrook]

Hmmm. I'm on the second plan down. Maybe I could afford the 3rd one down (getting an extra 150 GB for $20) but I do have a tight budget. It's worth thinking about. Though, running out of bandwidth has been the exception rather than the rule, and a higher priority is replacing my Hot Water System, which is 19+ years old and dying. I need to see if I can do that via my power company and pay it off in instalments. Now $20 a month for that would be a better deal, if I can get it.


However, I think I'm still in the 24 month period, so I can't really change until that's done. Need to check on that!

[gwendraith]

Sorry for the poorly constructed comment before - I was excited and in shock and my brain really wasn't working properly yesterday (or today it seems - up too early) :)

Glad the link was useful. I hope you can manage to get a better plan for your needs at a reasonable cost. I'm on a very low income as well and there's always something waiting to break in a home!

[laura_seabrook]

Well actually, the one at http://broadbandguide.com.au/iinet/plan/1889-7091-home-2-(iinetwork-adsl2-) looks a lot better for the same price. Not so sure about getting a bundle though, as I have $334 CREDIT on the Telstra account (about 10 months of average phone usage)!

[gwendraith]

Tricky if you have a credit on your Telstra account. Can you get that refunded?

[laura_seabrook]

I don't know. But I could easily just let it run out, by not paying more into the account. I pay a certain amount each fortnight rather than in a big hit.

Also it seems I'm "off-net" with iinet, so I'd need to pay an extra $10 a month to keep the ADSL2, but I'd also get 4x the bandwidth! Or maybe pay the same rate and get an extra 10 GB a month.