A terabyte data cap

Hamish Fletcher in the NZ Herald reports:

CallPlus plans to offer internet users hooked into the ultra-fast broadband network at least a terabyte of data each month.

While New Zealand may be looking forward to the 100 megabit speeds on the fibre internet network, commentators are worried the infrastructure will not be used to its potential as data caps will restrict the amount customers can download each month.

Slingshot and CallPlus director Malcolm Dick said his companies could offer unlimited data on the ultra-fast broadband network if more internet links out of New Zealand were built.

“A couple of years out … you’d hope that all those caps would be removed and it would be the same as in Europe and the States. Certainly in the worst case we’re looking in the terabytes [of internet use a month]. It will be up to at least a terabyte, I reckon, it has to be,” Dick said.

Having more content hosted and cached in NZ would help also, but sadly it is cheaper for major content providers to host in the US than in NZ.

A 1 TB data cap would be a lot better than the current offerings. But let us look at how quick it might still be gobbled up.

Say you are on the 30 Mb/s plan. That is equal to 3.75 MB/s. A TB is around 1 million (2^20) MBs so a 1 TB cap would last for around 280,000 seconds or 4,660 minutes which is around 78 hours.

Now a month has around 720 hours in it, but you don’t tend to spend all day on the Internet and you don’t spend all your time using the maximum speed.

So a 1 TB data limit would look to be pretty good to me.