The telco giant's three gigabyte per month usage cap should come into force as of July 5, but Telstra has notified customers that have opted to cancel their subscription that the cut-off date will in fact be Saturday, July 7.
"Once we have compiled a complete list of cancellations we will email final instructions to you," said a message sent to users.
"This means your service will not be disconnected until Saturday 7th July 2001, to allow you to receive final instructions on returning the modem via your email."
The message tells users that using email for the additional couple of days -will not be deemed to be your acceptance of the changes to the Terms and Conditions and Acceptable Use Policy. You will not be charged for your use of your service between 5 July and 7 July 2001", leading many users to believe that if they download anything other than email they will, by default, accept the terms and conditions of the three gigabyte per month usage cap.
This is not the case, according to Telstra.
Users can continue to use the full service, the carrier confirmed with ZDNet, -obviously we didn't want to publicise that fact," spokesman Stuart Gray said.
However, users must notify Telstra by today of their intention to opt out of contracts if they're not to incur penalties.
Customers that exceed the three gigabyte limit will be charged at AU$189 per gigabyte, making a six gigabyte usage worth AU$567, plus normal monthly rental.
Telstra declined to say how many users have opted out of its Freedom Plan since it announced its intentions to resrict downloads, but Optus@Home claims that sales have "more than doubled" since the telco giant's announcement.
"It's hard to narrow this down to Telstra's announcement as we have a very strong marketing campaign out there at the minute," an Optus@Home spokesperson told ZDNet.
"But we do believe this [announcement] has had some impact."
In short, if I could get Optus I would. It would be worth the extra install fee just to get away from a usless Telstra.
The usage meter that users are to use the calculate their usage, is only updated every second day (if users are lucky that is) but so far has nopt been updated since the 1st of July and seeing that it is now the 4th, that is a joke.
The usage meter should be updated atleast every 6 hours to be of any use to users at all.
Once a day is not enough and one every two to three days in just not on.
But then again w3e are talking about the worste telco in the business, but the one that makes the most money by ripping off it's customers and not spending money on their own network.
I wont use my bigpond email address because the mail server is normally down!