Some Telecom Big Time customers say the all-you-can-eat broadband plan has left a sour taste in their mouths.

Traffic from international websites in the past month or so has been woefully slow and made online gaming impossible, they say.

The plan gives customers unlimited downloads for $69.95 a month but Telecom reserves the right to ration internet traffic, particularly during peak times.

Big Time customer Hayden Kirk says the plan was initially very good, but its performance has dived in the past month.

"For the hours between six and 12 at night, it's quite hard to browse the web. It's overseas traffic, pages can take up to 30 seconds to a minute to load, otherwise they time out altogether.

"Gaming is now pretty much non-existent, you just can't do it."

Some customers have noticed an improvement in speeds lately but he hasn't. "If anything it's got worse."

Andrew Gall, also on Big Time, says performance has improved and the problem seems to be fixed, but latency – the time it takes data to travel between servers – on the plan was "way higher than it should be".

"Normal" latency is about 40 milliseconds, but latency for traffic from Europe has been about 600-700 milliseconds, he says.

"Online gaming was unusable. Anything international, even just surfing web pages, has been very slow and just complete crap."

He has contacted Telecom for an explanation and asked for compensation, he says.

"If it had been like this from the very beginning then you'd know that this is how bad it's going to be. But they had a good service for several months and then all of a sudden just changed the rules."

He says he will stick with the plan as long as the service is reasonable. "It's nice not having to worry about traffic caps. With a fixed data plan you'd get to a certain point of the month and have to say to the kids, `You can't watch YouTube any more this month'. Now they watch as much YouTube as they like."

Telecom spokeswoman Emma-Kate Greer says some Big Time customers experienced "a short period of congestion" between October 11 and 16 due to high uptake of the plan, but this was resolved by increasing network capacity.

"Customers who don't find Big Time right for them can move to any other current plan at any time but were not seeing evidence of this happening. We're very happy with how the plan is performing."

Big Time customers have vented their frustration with the plan on technology website Geekzone and gaming site GP Forums.

Consumer NZ spokeswoman Maggie Edwards says it has not had any complaints about Big Time but has fielded protests from people unhappy about Telecom pulling the plug on its Go Large plan.

The Go Large plan also allowed unlimited downloads, but Telecom stopped selling it in 2007 after complaints about its crippling speed restrictions.

Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/299879...for-gaming

Argh, just had to switch to this plan (since the other unlimited plan was discontinued).
I can confirm that it sucks.