AAPT offer Australian-first Unlimited ADSL2+, music subscription

Posted Monday, February 15, 2010 at 5:48 pm by Jason Cartwright |

Finally an Australian ISP – AAPT is putting their balls on the line with an unlimited ADSL2+ offer at an affordable price. Unlimited offers have come and gone in the past, but not at ADSL2 speeds. This is an Australian-first, a very welcome one. A critical point to the unlimited downloads is the cost, how much I hear you ask.. only A$99.95. Whilst that may sound like a lot for some, I can tell you we pay more than that for 50GB right now.

Called the ‘Entertainment Bundle’ there are a couple of catches. It does require you to sign up for a 2 year contract, costing you a minimum of A$2398.80. You’ll also need to bundle your phone, but you do get free line rental.

AAPT say that by introducing this they hope other ISP’s follow suit. Ultimately competition is a great thing for consumers, hopefully this will lead to a lowering for the cost of broadband in general across Australia. If the plan is successful, other ISPs are sure to follow suit. To never have to worry about download caps would fundamentally change the consume content. Being able to absorb as much content as we like with no restriction is an incredibly exciting concept.

It’s interesting to note the traditionally uncapped US ISPs have recently began introducing download caps of around 250GB, admittedly, most users won’t run into a cap of this size. With an ambitious offer like this, two major questions spring to mind.

Availability – with prices less than what some users pay for 50GB, if you can suck up the 2 year contract, a lot of users will be all over this. The question is, where is this available ? Unfortunately only ADSL is available here in Wodonga with AAPT – the same unlimited deal costs more on ADSL 1 – A$109.95. I suspect this is due to them renting equipment from other providers.

Infrastructure – the second question is what happens if it’s successful. There’s no doubt AAPT are taking a massive gamble on this new offer. A gamble that will either highlight them as an innovative ISP willing to push the boundaries of what internet costs in Australia, or will the demand melt the AAPT infrastructure, leaving customers locked into a broken service for 2 years ? Only time will tell, certainly one to watch.

As if the deal needed to get sweater, AAPT are also offering unlimited music streaming of more than 1 million tracks on the AAPT music store. Also included (I know this really does sound to good to be true), you get to spent $50 to buy tracks to keep. By today’s music standards, these should be DRM-free. Each track costs A$1.69, so you get around 30 per month.

If you can get it will you ? Does the 2 year contract scare you off ? – You can check availability by entering you phone number on the AAPT site.

More @ AAPT via Long Zheng