When we went onto this plan we went rapidly up to 200-300GB/month, and have stayed there since. I have no idea who in our large household is using so much or for what, and attempts to track down who and why weren't successful. Somehow, 40GB/month seems quite small, and $2/GB for going over is going to cost a hundreds of dollars a month.

How much does it cost Telecom to service marginal demand above 40GB/month? If we pay for the Pro plan, that is already substantially higher than the cost of the Big Time plan. Unfortunately, if Telecom can't make a better offer I'll probably look elsewhere, as I'm sure a lot of Big Time customers will.

I don't know why Telecos insist on having overage charges that are extreme compared to the costs of the base plans. When I worked in a Telecom call centre I took calls from customers on mobile broadband with bills in the thousands from blowing their data caps. 50C/MB for going over just makes problems for customers and the company. Customers aren't happy to have to call up, although if they do, they're glad to speak to someone who, if it is the first time, can generally get off the charges. For every customer who calls up, some will pay up and cancel their plans and probably vow never to have anything like that again. Telecos would probably make more money by having more modest overage charges that are still well above marginal cost, but cost customers say, $50 extra, rather than $500 or $2000.

Really - Get over it! The same old story a few users screwing it for the rest..

Family's on budgets shouldn't be paying $50 for the internet if things are that tough!

If you need to download hundreds of megabytes of data each month I would question whats being downloaded.. Legal Software??? I don't think so!!

I agree with Pete here. Its nothing to do with what we download. You can watch YouTube (Fully legal) and go through lots of data per month. I have 3 flat mates who are on YouTube all day and we have been using more than 100GB every month.
Telecom has very wrong corporate strategy and can never get things right. Ferrit, push-to-talk, TIVO, CDMA, XT are some good example. I live in wellington and I saw all the marketing hype for Ferrit and saw it fail badly.

Why is it in New Zealand we pay so much for communications. 89 cents per minute for mobile calling? We pay on average 30-40 % more for mobile devices. Have a look what america and Europe pay for the handsets compared to us.

Its not about managing the traffic, its about thinking what customers want and how to make it work. Its getting the systems right and investing in right technology. If other countries can do it, New Zealand can too.

ALD, I've no idea why we use a lot. We have up to 8 adults all with laptops or desktops in their rooms. We used to be fine with 10GB, then 20GB, then with Big Time it's through the roof. As with the Wellington flatmate Amit Singh its easy to use a lot and hard to identify who or what is using it all.

I get that but I'm talking people that are hitting a TB a month. I'm sorry but 500GB is extreme even for You Tube.

You can't regulate where people visit and what they download but with anything - You abuse, you lose!

End of the day it's the cost of international data v making a profit!

why is it telecom still thinks they can rule the world. they still think they are a monopoly. apparebtly if your locked into a contract and wanna leave you wobt be charged the early termination charges according to what i asked of telecom on twitter. in my opinion telecom again is losibg its competitive edge. its stupid in these times people wabt certianty not variables. not only that irs just holding nz back from the rest of the world. get your act together

well, there goes tv on demand -- especially as most of this content is hosted in Australia, generating international traffic.

I signed up to telecom solely for the Big Time Plan, got it connected on the 20th of this month, all is good until I checked my usage and find is on the 10Gb explorer plan.

I have to ring them, to find the big time plan has been scrapped. With no real alternative. They agreed to take me as a customer, using Big Time, connected me, and then without saying a thing, simply didn't give me Big Time.

I have had enough of them doing this, first it was move me from Go Large which I was happy with to Big Time which cost $10 more a month for exactly the same service. Now its dump big time altogether, Im going to move the lot to Voda or Orcon or something, and I am sure I was a profitable customer, my big time usage varied which is why I had it depending on what we were doing that much, some times less than 20gb, sometimes 90gb - never ever over 100 - Avg about 40gb looking back . So the landline + all those other services + the broadband, there is a couple of hundred a month from us they will never see again.

I use 40gb a month not often more, Just liked the flexibility, Im moving to Vodafone , even if it costs me more, they dont deserve my cash , Im happier to support anyone else in the hope they treat customers a little better. but we will see I guess. and I will enjoy the nice headphones Telecom sent me a month ago for loyalty - seems its a one way street.

I reckon the free gift in March to bind me to Telecom for another year was a dodgy trick. They must have known that people on a Big Time plan might leave. Is this legal? I would like to know if the gift only went to Big Time customers or other "valued" broadband customers as well.

I accepted the offer because I knew I wouldn't change to another provider because of the Big Time plan. Now I'm certainly looking for alternatives. If now after scrapping Big Time I won't have a chance to get out of the contract I will leave Telecom early next year for good, that's for sure.

I'm not a power user, anything between under 10GB to about 100GB per month upload/download combined, with an average of 35GB per month over the last year - I just didn't want to worry to go over any maximum limit and pay extra or be throttled down.

In other comparable countries broadband is charged by speed only, not by data traffic. That's quite a step backwards. Very disappointing.

...Telecom is a very rich company thanks to the network which was paid for by taxpayers for generations, and then was privatised in a stroke of genius!

This is so stupid... I am so sick of hearing men and women of 'middle age' complaining about people abusing the system. The system is always trying to steal from us, this isn't some charity being abused. We are more than 5 years behind OECD countries when it comes to home broadband. Content delivery nowadays online needs unlimited broadband, there are plenty of legal things that might be 10+GB, such as if you are buying your games online through Steam, or if you are buying movies through iTunes or another service. I don't want to steal anything I just want the content truly 'on demand' without having to pay for shipping or packaging - if the stuff I wanted to watch was on TV I would just record it on my MySkyHDI unit, but the fact is it isn't.

As an article in NPR recently expressed, many people are only downloading things 'illegally' because it is not available through normal distribution or if you can order it from overseas it takes ages and is unfairly priced - this is the fault of the distributors of the content. Someone I know is an advisor to the UK Govt & is on the board of the UK Treasury and when the Hollywood Studios came to try to bully the UK Govt into searching out 'downloaders' and prosecuting them (at the Govt's expense!) he told them to stick it up their arse because it was completely their fault for trying to hold onto an old distribution model rather than getting in front of the problem and being the ones to make the content available online legally. Bottom line they are just too greedy. But SURPRISE SURPRISE in NZ when the execs came we just Kow-Tow'd to them and agreed to the demands of foreign industry executives. What a croc.

This is just absolutely ridiculous and I am just not going to bother with a broadband plan again until someone has the guts to offer something fair.

This is an outage and this is totally unfair. Why is Telecom doing this to us Big Time consumers of New Zealand? Anonymous' posting, Disappointing, has definitely hit the nail on the head and I agree that other countries charge broadband based on speed not traffic. Where is the consumer's rights of us clients and why is the government not doing anything about this? With a bloody rip-off and shame on you, Telecom!

Way to go telecom, now people hate you for muckng around with XT and cutting the unlimited broadband plan! Great come back.

You've lost another customer.

Bigtime was perfect for large flats like mine because it stoped all the conflict about who was using what and when (especially when somone downloade alot and blew the cap). You can never monitor everyones usage perfectly in a situation like that so instead everyone in the flat has to pay for it!

IMA INCITE A FU*IN RIOT 2MOROW AT PALIMENT NOT HAPPY CAME HOME HAD A MEAN NITE MTEDEN DUBSTEP MY MATE SEND ME THIS LINK FU*N FURIOUS IF U CUT MY SH*T I WILL STEAL MY INTERNET F*K U MONEY HUNGRY GRIMY MP"Z KILLILUMINATI BLLLLAAAAT!!!! ONE!

I'm already on the Pro Plan, 40 GB/month and I find it's not enough, I'm not a gamer but you'll find that even watching all the great tv shows on tvnzondemand will blow through your allowance pretty quickly, take for instance two 1 hour shows is around 1.4 GB and that's already a chunk of your allocation gone right there.

Don't think that because you don't download that your allocation stays untouched.

I also like legally downloading paid movies from the internet and that eats up the other half of my allowance.

It's just too restricting, and my brother who lives in silicon valley in the US who pays $30/month for an all you can eat, uncapped buffet of broadband makes me jealous. Why oh why are we soooo behind?

When I joined the Pro plan the operator told me 2c per MB for excess usage and I was shocked, she told me that it worked out to be $2 a GB, I said "you obviously don't know how many MB's there are in a GB". I told her it was $20!!!, I couldn't believe it so whenever I watch anything online, I will religiously check my broadband usage every few hours, it's crazy having to ration and budget your allocation because I'm so scared of going over the limit and that's where your horror sized bills come from.

Just 10 GB's over, which is easssssssy to do equals a crazy $200 bill on top of the $79.95 you already pay.

Come on Telecom, step up to world standards, you have to be more competitive in todays market.

You be good to your customers and they'll reward you with loyalty because I gotta tell you, www.world-net.co.nz is looking pretty good right now.

90 GB per month for $89.95.......sounds like what I need, heck I'm already paying $79.95 for 40 GB, so for an extra $10/month and I get an extra 50 GB!, and their excess is only $2/GB, something I can live with as opposed to Telecom's $20/GB.

Step up Telecom if you want to keep customers!!

That's all I'm saying.

Peace out.

all you people who proclaim
"I've had enough, I'm moving to another ISP"
sadly changing I.s.p's isn't an answer as Telecom still own the hardware, if you change service providers your just giving your money to another company who in turn give it to Telecom (minus their share)
i was told this by a telco contracted tech. who was testing my line speed, i asked him how he/telecom felt about the recent (at that time) unbundling announcement to which he stated "makes no real monetary difference to telecom as the currently own all the inground wiring/exchange, cabinets, server farms, etc so in the end no matter who your service provider is, telecom still make money"
kinda makes you realize how bad the decision to privatize the sole tel-co infrastructure of a nation was.

Well, I've just received the letter re: end of Big Time plan and spoken to three Telecom employees who really couldn't offer me anything other than an extra $8a month credit for a year so I'm off to Orcon! And if they try and stop me because we took their pocky gift as a bribe I'll take it further! You're not telling me they didn't know they were going to biff Bigtime! Telecom still hasn't never learnt that basic lesson - the customer is always right.

I told them where they could put it, very nicley when they offered it. I have never regretted that decision

I am writing to express my disappointment at the removal of your EVDO data service. I cannot believe that once again, Telecom is unable to continue to provide me with the service for which I have been paying. I struggle to understand how you can try to offer me a reduced serviced at the same price (in effect trying to forcing me to change to a network I do not trust and that you admitted yourselves, has been badly implemented) and expect to retain any of the last remaining vestiges of customer loyalty that I may have felt for your company.
2 years ago I bought the Okta Touch. It does all I wanted and more. Finally I had a product from your company that did what it said it would. Actually, I do not use the phone very often for voice calls or texting. It is the wireless broadband that I use. Yes, the very same service you now intend to discontinue.
I was not informed at the time of purchase that my new phone would not be compatible with the new XT service which was just around the corner at that stage. I did buy some accessories at the time, one of which was a mini-usb to 3.5mm stereo jack adapter so that I could use normal headphones with the phone and plug it into my car stereo system. One year later I wished to purchase a replacement. By now I was no longer surprised when, at first, no one knew what I was talking about. I was even told that the adapters did not exist. Upon producing the evidence (my old adapter) someone finally went to see if they could locate them. The adapter that had once cost a reasonable $9.99 now cost $29.99. I ordered it and one month later renewed my order as it seemed to have disappeared. Two weeks later the adapter arrived - It did not work. The replacement arrived a week later - it did not work. The multi-million dollar company in whom I had place my trust was unable to provide an adapter for the phone they had sold me and I was told I they (you) could do no more.
The adapter I bought on Ebay cost around $50.00 in the end. This was nothing compared to the run-around, misinformation, inconvenience, wasted travel time and incompetence I experienced trying to obtain the adapter from your telecom shop.
Now you intend to close down the only service that I have genuinely been satisfied with and you offer $200.00 compensation for unkept promises. The fact that you state that I will continue to be able to access the internet means that you are having to maintain a service. To then turn around and say that this service will be reduced but still cost me the same is insulting.
I believe that the time is rapidly approaching that there will be a parting of our ways and it will not be that another provider has lured me away but because you lost my customer loyalty through circumstances of your own making.

I really wish Telecom would stop treating it's customers like complete idiots. They have experience in the broadband business for many years and to say that they had to cease the Big Time plan due to problems managing their data filtering is complete hogwash. The fact is Telecom's only true responsibility is to it's shareholders who in recent times have been under increasing strain due to Telecom's business changes and the recent (highly publicised) XT debacle. Also, in order to win their share of the government's proposed fibre network roll-out they need to claw back on current costs and increase profits in the interim so they looked closely at where cuts can be made. The Big Time plan was the obvious choice for slashing.

Like any big company they have to dragged kicking and screaming into change and despite them trying to sell modern broadband products they have yet to shed their archaic image and erratic decision making.

Yes Telecom needs to make profits like any sensibly run company should, but to willingly sign up tens of thousands of customers to their Big Time plan with the promise of unmetered data usage and then to simply dump them is at best deception by stealth and at worst disgraceful business practice. Shame on you Telecom. I guess some things never change.