Significant competition from the likes of Optus@Home recently has given cause for Telstra BigPond to devise flat-rate pricing plans that have opened up its cable service to the residential market. The Freedom Standard and the Freedom Deluxe plans lifted the old 500MB download cap, and coincided with the opening of ports to allow things like online gaming, IRC chat and teleconferencing. The trade off for a flat-rate plan, however, is a rate-limited service, throttled back from the full download speed of 10Mbit/sec to a relatively slow 512Kbit/sec for the Freedom Deluxe plan, or 256Kbit/sec download and 64Kbit/sec upload speed for the Freedom Standard plan. Given that the Freedom Standard plan is only $5.55 per month less than the Freedom Deluxe plan, it makes more sense to go with the Deluxe option and enjoy twice the bandwidth. Even so, as the results show, when the capped BigPond cable is performing close to peak speeds, it simply cannot match the phenomenal download speeds of Optus@Home.

Installation fees vary according to the length of the contract you choose, the most expensive being $399 for a three month contract. Should you ever have to reformat, the required network settings are relatively simple, dynamically assigning your IP address. As a portal, the telstra.com home page offers all the typical services like news and sport, plus entertainment and shopping, and Wireplay game servers run multiplayer games such as CounterStrike and Quake III.

Telstra has recently introduced a new Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) which limits users to 3GB a month in bandwidth (see Acceptable Use, p53). Telstra also places a restriction on how many simultaneous users can be connected to the cable, and you have to pay an additional fee if you hook up your cable to a LAN.

Telstra BigPond cable is a good choice for residential users who require moderate bandwidth for a reasonable price, and even with the 3GB monthly cap, it is still better priced than equivalent DSL services. Gamers will also love the low pings. However, given the performance results and its additional features, Optus@Home is still the premier cable service.