Large demos no longer a quota problem. While online gaming will eat up a small portion of your quota, it's in the field of game demos and add-on packs that this could offer significant value
Sure, it might be at the beginning of what looks to be some very nasty legal action surrounding the alleged P2P activities of its users, but that, it seems, doesn't stop iiNet, at least not for long.
Not satisfied this week with unveiling plans to offer an IPTV service to users on its DSLAM network sometime in 2009, the company's also announced that downloads and data usage from the Xbox 360 console will no longer count towards user quotas.
Quota free activities are nothing new in the ISP space; most providers normally have some small cached files on offer. Still, iiNet's been rather aggressive in this space recently, offering all iTunes and ABC iView content on a quota-free basis; only Telstra's massive BigPond offerings in games and movies is really comparable.
While online gaming will eat up a small portion of your quota, it's in the field of game demos and add-on packs that this could offer significant value to 360 fanatics. As an example, if you wanted the demo version of Tomb Raider:Underworld, you would have been charged for 1GB of downloads yesterday.
On an average iiNet broadband plan, that download could have equated to around $2 "worth" of quota, depending on when you download it and your plan specifics. Today, it's free.
The only potential downside to all this free activity could be if iiNet gets rather overloaded with Lara Croft-crazed download fanatics keeping the network permanently busy, something which will be interesting to observe in upcoming months.