In the first deal of its kind, PlanetMirror has wrangled an agreement out of Telstra to exempt downloads from the PlanetMirror site from Telstra's broadband download limit. It took two years to negotiate the deal with Telstra, which allows PlanetMirror to offer its 'premium' service.
The criticism of PlanetMirror on broadband forum site Whirlpool concerned offering a paid service to download programs that are available for free elsewhere on the net, and indeed the non-premium portions of PlanetMirror's site.
"I am always interested in constructive criticism," Andrades told ZDNet Australia , in reference to the comments on Whirlpool. "A few people made useful suggestions which we are looking at incorporating but the majority of comments were simply not useful."
"If it is a useful and valuable service then people are willing to pay," said Andrade. "If there is no value to be gained then they won't. We're betting that PlanetMirror provides a useful service and Australian users would want to support it and see it continue to grow."
There are three levels to the premium service: 3GB of downloads cost AU$19.95 per month, 5GB of downloads cost AU$29.95 and 10GB of downloads cost AU$49.95. If these downloads were charged as excess downloads they would cost between AU$99-159, depending on the BigPond plan.
"We believe that quality of service is an increasing issue on the Internet today," said Andrade. "PlanetMirror Premium offers separate servers, prioritised bandwidth and generally aims to give users a better service than is possible for freely available sites."
"With dialup this has been less of an issue as it can be hard to notice quality issues at 5Kbyte/sec. With broadband this has become much more noticeable," he added.
For heavy users of Telstra's BigPond broadband the service offers substantial savings. Some ISPs offer unlimited downloads at certain times, say between 1-8 am, but Telstra does not offer this feature.
"This agreement allows us to generate a revenue stream to fund the core business of providing a download service," said Andrade. "For the consumer it provides a method to directly support a service they are using as well as the communities that make this content available." PlanetMirror puts some funding from the premium service directly into the open source community, which provides a large number of the downloads it offers.
PlanetMirror is currently in negotiations with other ISPs to negotiate a similar arrangement.
And we are being encouraged to go to Broadband???
While these depositories may be helpful to many subscribers, the costs on top of already inflated broadband prices has turned me of converting to Bigpond.
Luckly there are plans out there that allow for downloads from such depositories similar to Planet Mirror for next to nothing, all i need now is for Telstra to unlock the copper.....