iiNet launches unlimited NBN plans

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news iiNet has announced a trio of new plans offering limitless data over the NBN, starting at $69.99 a month.

That near-70 bucks starting point will buy users the basic “Liimitless” (not a typo) plan, which provides limitless data at a “basic speed” of up to 12Mbps download and up to 1Mps upload.

Customers wanting better speed with their Liimitless data plan can opt for one of two “speed boost” plans offering up to 25Mbps download and up to 5Mbps upload.

Both of these plans come with local and standard national calls included, while one includes Australian mobile calls for just $10 extra per month. Costs for these plans are $79.99 and $89.99 a month, respectively.

Should users want “top speeds” with their Liimitless data, iiNet’s “max” plans offer up to 100Mps download and up to 40Mps upload.

There are three max plans on offer, ranging in cost from $99.99 to $119.99 a month, with limitless data and a range of call benefits from pay as you go, to free local and national, to free local, national and mobile.

Potential customers can check if their location lies within the current NBN footprint by visiting the NBN Coverage Checker, or see when their area is scheduled to go live.

iiNet stresses that quoted speeds for the Liimitless plans are “maximum connection speeds as provided by NBN”, and actual throughput speeds may be slower and could vary due to “many factors”.

Image credit: CeBIT Australia, Creative Commons

38 COMMENTS

  1. Current iiNet plans have also been upgraded to the new “Limitless” data allowance. I received an email from iiNet yesterday informing me that I was now on the “Limitless” plan, with the data allowance as the only change to my DSL plan (I was previously on 1TB).

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  2. Surely this cannot be correct. Unlimited data for $69.99 and $99.99 on 100Mb? Haven’t they consulted Ergas, they should be priced at $200+. It must be right, because even after all real world evidence showed it wasn’t, he still used that report as the basis for his really truly independent CBA (LNP voting card available in Appendix A)

    • I have to say I was happily surprised, particularly after Internode recently upgraded my DSL plan to unlimited. I thought going to NBN would be a retrograde step and I’d need to practice bending over and grabbing my ankles.

      Good on Internode and iiNet – they definitely have more clue than most of the other ISP’s. This is going to make cloud backup services worry free, etc.

      • “I thought going to NBN would be a retrograde step”
        Oh it must. Maybe one of the copper shills will explain why to you. It will not make any sense, but they will keep spinning away.

      • There have been RSPs offering ‘unlimited’ access for years. This just more closely follows TPGs already existing pricing model.

  3. I think I noticed Internode changed their NBN plans about a week ago. All I need now is an NBN connection.

    The interesting thing is that Internode / iiNet want $100pm for a 100/40 unlimited plan, meanwhile if you go to Telstra at the moment getting 100/2 1TB plan costs $140pm for their cable plan.

    Since NBN already bought the cable network and leases it back to Telstra I’d always hoped we’d be able to sign up for NBN services with RSP’s before they upgrade it from DOCSIS 3.0 to 3.1.

    I guess we need to wait years until….

    Oh well.

  4. What a joke.

    iinet is already running at CVC capacity in FNQ. I have FTTP, fibre comes right to my front door, I have been enjoying 100/40 for the past 18 months & now at peak times I am downloading less than 5Mbit for the past 6+ weeks.

    This is before they go waving the ‘unlimited download’ flag.

    I’ve had it all tested, complained to the TIO & iinet came back advising the exchange is running at capacity.. so they offered to release me from the remainder of my contract.

    Guess they will gain some clients, guess they will lose a fair amount too.

  5. $70 for faulty ADSL revamps. No thanks. TPG is always congested. It was when I was on faulty telephone lines.

  6. $100 for cable.

    If its really 100/40 that is $12 more than what I’m paying now for 100/2. I actually get 115 out of cable right now.

    That is acceptable. But cable will never reach that. It’s going to fall over now. People who already get 100mbps with cable will lose that now thanks to faulty copper and congestion.

    You’ll just be getting scammed. A 100/40 connection is only for FTTP.

  7. They need to market it different depending what people get. If you get telephone lines then my word $70 is legal scamming.

    Their faulty ADSL revamp should be marketed as ADSL. It’s not worth a cent. Try $50 or less ?

  8. With more and more unlimited plans, they need to start declaring what contention ratios or CVC they operate on.

    • There is no such thing as free lunch. The rsult of this is that customers should expect contention ratios to rise and for the purchase of higher speed plans to have little value especially in peak periods.

      I wonder if this decision was the result of iiNet sharing NBN CVC with TPG and hence running into congestion issues? Alternatively it could be driven by 79% selecting 25Mbps or slower.

      The only benefit will be to reduce the performance difference between HFC, FTTN & FTTP.

  9. I choose to be with an ISP that does NOT provide unlimited plans for obvious reasons, the day they do, I’m gone.

    • You do know you get what you pay for right? an ISP that offers “unlimited” at say $200/month should be able to provide you with close to 100Mbps at all hours. An ISP that offer unlimited for less than $100 a month will not be able to give you 100Mbps in peak, it’s just not feasible at the moment.
      I love how the first thing everyone looks at is “unlimited” and they don’t consider real word speeds. Guess that’s why words like “unlimited” and “limitless” are used by the marketing gurus.

      • I get unlimited 100/40 for $69/mth and have always had 100/40 during peak or any other time I have cared to test… Contention != automatic loss of speed

    • @ Simon
      yes I know.
      I am not comparing standard plans to business plans.

      My comment was referring to iiNet’s prices being pretty standard to all other RSPs.

  10. “iiNet stresses that quoted speeds for the Liimitless plans are “maximum connection speeds as provided by NBN”, and actual throughput speeds may be slower and could vary due to “many factors”.”

    The ACCC aren’t going to be very happy about this. No wonder they want ISPs to be more upfront with consumers about what speeds they can actually expect to get.

    These plans sound more like an alignment with the TPG parent company – so much for aiming the different brands at different markets, although to be honest I don’t know that the “premium” brands were ever really worth the extra $.

    I suppose one good thing is if TPG/iiNet drive up bandwidth utilisation on NBN then there may be more pressure put on NBN to do something about CVC pricing, instead of claiming (like the politicians) that there is just no demand.

    • Looks like TPG and iiNet are mirror images now (Node still marginally different being there’s no phone line bundled in? so plans $5 cheaper)

      afaik Node still use their own CVC too although no-one sounds confident how long that will last.

      • A separate CVC connection for Internode is unlikely to last long because on the NBN you need an economy of scale to provide plans at a reasonable price and be profitable. The exception to this might be if TPG choose to use the Internode brand for the SMB market and maintain a separate CVC connection to ensure performance.

  11. Sounds like a TPG tactic. Price and Service levels plummet.
    With high CVC costs, no company in Australia can offer unlimited NBN plans for this price and make money, so that leaves one option – massively under configured CVC leading to dreadful NBN user experience for iiNet customers for most of the day (and night).
    Goodbye iiNet culture, hello TPG – it didn’t take long.

  12. ‘actual throughput speeds may be slower and could vary due to “many factors”’ aka “we’ve heavily oversubscribed the links and you won’t even get a tenth of this between 6pm and 11pm but we’ve told you this upfront”.

      • 1Mbps of CVC costs $17.50 per month. Someone who attempts to stream 100Mbps will require iiNet to purchase $1750 just in CVC. Sure most people won’t do this but it will require only a few for the plans to become unprofitable.

        If an RSP was able to introduce a plan like internode’s old flatrate plan which prioritised traffic based on an inverse of the data consumed in the past 30 days then these plans might be attractive for low data usage customers. However RSPs cannot prioritise traffic while on the NBN network which means prioritisation on the customer router which would be easy to work around.

  13. TPG should just fold the iiNet network into the TPG network.
    There is no point in running duplicate networks, it costs far too much money.
    Let the cry babies cry, most will stay anyway. Its not like they have anyone else to go too anyway lol.

  14. And STILL iinet / TPG do not offer a 50/20 Mbps plan on NBN Fixed Wireless, 8 months after NBNco made it available.

  15. And neither offer any plans on NBN satellite. So much for the NBN is equal for everyone

    • Trust me, they don’t need the headaches. The LTSS service is wracking up a massive amount of TIO complaints against RSPs – all completely out of their control.

  16. Disclaimer: I have iiNet FTTP. That’s $79.99 for “NBN Fibre 2 (Boost)” (25/5); and sundry VoIP charges.

    When I was on ?DSL*, I had only one speed available, dependent only on the quality of copper and the number of other users on the line. I was NOT charged more or less according to the speed I enjoyed, nor was anybody else. Imagine: less than 1k, $$$$; up to 2k, $$$; up to 3k, $$; more than 3 k, $. Wouldn’t that have been nice?

    So now I’m on fiber with zero copper, and distance is no longer a real problem, why is iiNet–or any other ISP–now charging for speed ratings? Look at this another way: as a person close to me in the industry explained, if your allowance is 1TB on a 100/40, you’ll need to download the internet continuously, 24/24, for a month just to get near your allowance. On my 25/5, no show. So in a way, my 25/5 is better value because I CAN NEVER MAX IT OUT.

    But the question remains: why does the industry insist on charging for speed rather than for downloads? Look at what they have to do to regulate downloads: network buffering. The effect of network buffering on my account is “hiccup surfing”. I get lovely snappy page loads for 4 or 5 minutes, then massive latency kicks in for 10 or 20 minutes. Then back to snappy surfing. Then back to latency. And so it goes. The net effect is that my overall surfing on FTTP is no better than ADLS2+ at 4,000 meters from the exchange. And it costs me $10/month more!

    So if iiNet was truly innovative, they would offer only two speed tiers: 100/40 and 100/100. 100/100 could be sold at a (smallish) premium for those who need a symmetric connection. But download quotas would attract tier pricing as they did in the past.

    It is for sure, as soon as I see an ISP who can give me 100/40 with tiered download quotas starting at $70 in WA, I’ll be in like Flynn. But I’m not holding my breath.

    • They need to balance their own costs as well. They buy X spectrum, which gets shared with every user on that cable. So if they buy 150 Mbps, thats all there is to share amongst the 32 people (or whatever it is) accessing it.

      Its worth noting that its very rare for multiple people to be using their connection at full capacity on the same line at the same time. But two people is likely to happen frequently enough they cant go too low.

      So they have lower speed options to be able to manage that. If it was max speed regardless you would get far more contention issues on a daily basis, and people would be complaining left, right, and centre.

      If they buy more spectrum, most of it gets wasted, so its a waste of money. And they are a business after all.

      This is a cost management decision, and one all ISP’s do. They get a certain amount of speed for free, but after that the blocks they need to commit to arent cheap.

      • “They buy X spectrum, which gets shared with every user on that cable.”

        And who profits from that purchase? Frankly this looks like the major obstacle to “Fast Broadband Everywhere”. Maybe I’ve been a bit slow arriving at the idea we have been gulled big time, but right now I see no reason to be enthusiastic about “Digital Economy”, unless there is some way I too can get something for nothing. Reliability? Schmiability.

        Yes the public must undertake funding of any infrastructure through taxes and/or tolls, but any comparison with a major “freeway” artificially limited to 60Km speed limits looks entirely valid. And I do have to point out that freeways–like traffic rotaries–function best (that means properly) with sparse traffic. They switch over to parking lots when hit with peak-hour traffic. Just like NBN fiber.

        • I really come down to a case of how it all eventually gets paid for and how you get those people to pay for it. We do actually do something similar with roads but it isn’t noticed as much because because the cost seems small relative to the cost of buying a car in the first place. Registration expenses are actually more expensive for larger vehicles (an analogy to speed tiers) and their are taxes on fuel covering usage. Imagine what would happen if we removed these artificial limits but still needed that revenue, would you be happy paying a lot more for registration or you small car you drive 10km to from work 5 days to cover the rego and tax from fuel for the road train doing >1000km/day. One thing will happen less people will use cars as alternative like public transport become cheaper to the point that people will suffer the inconvenience. Now there are less cars but we have already built the roads so we still have the same capital costs to recover and the ongoing maintenance doesn’t drop that much. So rego costs go up again and suddenly the dream of universal access to roads becomes inaccessible to the poor and the lower middle class.

          If we weren’t looking at a cost recovery model and where just building it to provide access to all and writing it off as a budget expense (the lie the LNP and News Limited have been telling) then the only limits that would need to imposed would those that ensure everyone has equitable access.

          • Your analogy is incomplete.

            Larger vehicles are heavier which require roads built to higher standards and cause more damage to roads as they travel.
            Fuel taxes are theoretically supposed to cover the cost of road maintenance and these are largely based on distance travelled. However electric cars are disrupting this model.

            Speed tiers meain that universal access will be 12Mbps which is little better than the average ADSL connection. Like with electricity and driving people can prioritise what devices / journeys are important but Labor’s NBNCo pricing structure means that you must commit to speed for an entire month not the 1 hour you need it for an eHealth consultation.

    • The problem is that RSPs are limited by the NBNCo wholesale pricing structure which was put in place by Labor. Labor developed an artificial pricing structure which contained both data charges and speed tiers.

      The result of this is that thge majority of Australians (79% and rising) are choosing slow plans (25Mbps and slower) because they are cheaper and missing out on the benefits of the NBN.

  17. Your person may be in the industry, but I wouldn’t pay much attention to what they say… you will blow through your 1TB in *ONE DAY* on a fully utilised 100/40, or 17 hours if including the upload capacity.

    A 100Mbit connection = 10MBytes downloaded every sec if maxed out, so:

    10MB * 60 = 600MBytes per minute
    600MB * 60 = 36GB per hour
    36GB * 24 = 864GB per day (There goes your monthly allowance…)
    864GB * 31 = 26.7TB per month

    If you include 35Mbit of the upload capacity,then you end up with a little over 36TB per month.

  18. I am with iiNet 100/40 in Canberra and i was happy customer in peak hours till last week. I normally get 90-95 off peak and 80-90 peak hours. After they released the new limteless plans, my speeds drops as low as 30 mbit/sec around 9 pm and 50 from 7 to 11 pm.
    I raised a ticket with them but i know they won’ do anything so next step is 50% discount or i will move away. Is there anybody there with premium service other than Telstra? I was with Skymesh but their international speeds is shocking.

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