Only a few years ago, deciding to upgrade to broadband presented a couple of easy choices. Everyone knew that cable was fast and expensive, and if you wanted it there were two options: Telstra or Optus. Even then, your decision was already made as usually you only physically had Optus or Telstra cables running down your street, not both. Essentially, it took about five seconds to decide on your broadband plan.

But times have changed and now potential broadband users need to take a more active role in deciding where to go for their fat pipes. There are well over 400 broadband ISPs in Australia and many are nationwide with rural coverage. There's a range of different technologies available and the prices between plans are widely varied. In fact, in order to make an informed decision you'll need to take each plan from each ISP (some ISPs can have around 20 plans), analyse the prices and specs to make a value judgment depending on your specific needs, and then make your choice. All up, without stopping to sleep or eat, you should be able to generate your own broadband report in a fortnight.

This month, we've eliminated the middle man. We've asked a massive amount of ISPs intimate details about their plans and carefully selected the most relevant ones for you. We've done the legwork by breaking internet users down into four categories: home user; power user; gamer; and home office. All you need to think about is what type of person you are and what your online habits are likely to be. We weren't easy on the ISPs and we've managed to get one of the most carefully guarded and hugely important specifications: the oversubscription rate. This is such an important specification that ISPs were warned that recommendations would not be given unless it was provided to us.

So read on for PC Authority's comprehensive roundup of Australia's leading ISPs and their best plans.

Broadband fundamentals

Technology

There are several current technologies used to connect to the internet from home, and each has its relative strengths and weaknesses.

The oldest and most established technology is dial-up, which uses a modem (modulator/demodulator) to connect to your ISP using the conventional telephone system. The technology has been around for decades, and speeds have gone from the early 2,400b/s (300 bytes per second) levels to the current maximum of 56Kb/s (7 kilobytes per second) using the V.90 or V.92 protocol. The limitations to dial-up are the bandwidth of the telephone system, meaning speed increases are unlikely in the future.

Cable has also been around for several years, and uses a fibre-optic cable network that connects to your home to hook you up to the internet. The advantage of cable is many homes in metropolitan areas are already connected to pay TV, such as Optus TV or Foxtel, and so can use the same connection for the net. Very high speeds are also possible due to the inherent high bandwidth of cable. Current cable connections can allow speeds of up to 10Mb/s, which is equivalent to basic LAN speeds. The downside of cable is it's only available in some metro areas, and in few regional areas, and your choice in providers is limited.

DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) is a relatively new technology that uses the same copper line as used by your telephone (and dial-up modem), although it is not limited to the bandwidth of regular dial-up. It does this by bypassing the regular telephone equipment that is only built to listen to the frequencies normally needed for voice. Instead, special equipment listens for a much broader range of frequencies, which increases the bandwidth that can be used. As such, different DSL technologies can reach speeds of up to 6Mb/s. The most common DSL technology is ADSL, which gives download speeds of up to 1.5Mb/s and upload speeds of up to 512Kb/s.

DSL is limited by the fact that you need to have a DSL-enabled telephone exchange nearby. Many more homes are capable of connecting through DSL than cable, but there are also many areas, both metro and regional, that have older exchanges or are too far away from their nearest exchange.

Satellite is the final common way of connecting to the net. The most common satellite technology is one-way, which means you use a standard modem to upload at 33.6Kb/s, but you get your downloads from the satellite. This gives decent download speed, and makes broadband available even in remote areas, but the upload speed and latency of the connection make it unsuitable for certain applications, like gaming or teleconferencing. The other satellite technology is two-way, where your satellite dish actually transmits as well as receives. Due to the complexity of a satellite transmitter, the cost is very high, but it allows higher two-way performance and you can connect from virtually anywhere on the planet.

Below you'll see a comparison of the relative speeds of the different technologies. These are the raw theoretical speeds though, and you can expect to only get about 70-80 percent of that speed in the real world. The chart also ignores network congestion and the speed of the server on the other end, but it serves to illustrate the vast differences in speed between the likes of dial-up and, well, just about everything else. We've also included a chart showing how long it would take to download an average 4MB MP3 file for your reference.

Plans

Broadband plans need to be closely scrutinised – looking at just the basic elements like price and speed is like jumping headfirst into a wading pool. To avoid hidden costs and dodgy service, consider the following points closely.
Metering is a simple concept, but it's a major point of difference between plans. From your ISP's point of view, there are only two types of data that can be uploaded or downloaded: metered and unmetered. Metered content is anything you download or upload that contributes to your cap, or in other words, how much you are actually billed for. Unfortunately download limits in Australia have always been a sore point with broadband users and to get around this some ISPs have introduced specific 'unmetered' content which doesn't count towards your cap.
 
The most common form of unmetered content is local mirroring of overseas sites like www.tucows.com shareware. Exclusive news, video and other media files are fast becoming more popular with larger ISPs like AOL|7 and Telstra. Another hidden catch is gaming, which can suck down many megabytes of data an hour, so some ISPs host unmetered game servers.

File-sharing is another bandwidth-hungry activity and some ISPs have banded together to offer free downloads to users via a special backbone. PIPE is one network that Australian ISPs use to connect to each other and keep local content in Australia. As a result, ISPs on PIPE can exchange data with each other at low cost, which filters down to file-sharing users. As long as the other person you're downloading from is on PIPE, your download won't be metered.

Off peak downloads are similar to unmetered content, but it's time-sensitive. Instead of being limited to certain domains, networks, sites and servers – off-peak downloads are usually any type of content that's downloaded when everyone's gone to bed, such as midnight to 8am. Some ISPs like iiNet offer an individual cap for off peak times, which won't affect your normal download cap.

Oversubscription rate isn't usually made public. For ISPs, oversubscription is how money is made, but it's also something that can seriously degrade the service for customers. To illustrate, let's take a hose that pumps through 10 litres of water a minute. If we split the end of the hose into 10 smaller hoses w