Internode chops ADSL prices

Alex Kidman | May 7, 2008 10:02 AM

But what's the best deal on the block? Internode's new plans are good for Usenet, but we've found better.

ISP Internode fired a salvo this week in what could hopefully become a budget ADSL price war, announcing it's chopping $5 off the price of its "ADSL Plus" plans. These offer up to 8Mb/s, and now start at $69.95 per month. $5 might not seem like much per se, but it's good to see at least some competition; while there's plenty of jousting in areas such as wireless and Naked DSL, poor old ADSL plans have been rather stagnant for some time.

Internode's offering is an interesting one, with features including premium Usenet access (for all those *ahem* legitimate files you need to download rapidly without anyone knowing) and an "expectation" of better speeds than the company's standard 1.5Mb/s, although there's no specified guarantee of better speeds.

Checking around, Internode's offer is a good one, as long as you take the additional services such as premium Usenet into account. Having said that, you can still get a lot more data for $70 than Internode's offering on these plans -- and given the variability of line speeds, we'd argue that data is the most important base metric for any broadband plan, as it's the one thing you can rely on getting each and every month.

Even Internode's own ADSL 2+ plans outpace the value of ADSL Plus; $75 will get you 40GB of ADSL2+, and there are even better plans out there. If you're in a coverage area, TPG's $69.99 ADSL2+ Super Heavy 2 plan, will give you a whopping 150GB of downloads, although you'll have to sneak 110GB of that data inbetween 3am and 9am. On the wireless front, $55 a month could get you 6GB of downloads via 3 Mobile, albeit in a rather limited sphere of availability.