Big catch in 'triple play' small print

Telstraclear's new "triple play" InHome packages may not be as attractive as they seem, with some heavy internet users saying they represent a "great leap backwards".

The company this week unveiled a series of packages offering phone service and SkyTV bundled with the country's fastest commercially available internet access. On the surface, the packages are attractively priced but, as postings in an online gaming chatroom have pointed out, the fine print indicates new limits on how much data users can download, which would boost costs.

Existing TelstraClear internet offerings count domestic data traffic as one-tenth of international traffic. So if a user downloaded 10 megabytes of data from a US-based website, it would count as 10 megabytes towards his or her limit. The same amount of data downloaded from a New Zealand-based website, however, would count only as 1 megabyte.

The InHome plans now make no distinction and count all data at the international level, forcing advanced internet users - such as gamers and heavy downloaders - into packages with higher data limits. At that point, these users say, the prices look less attractive.

TelstraClear is also giving up a competitive advantage by abandoning the domestic-international split, because Telecom does not offer it, the users say.

A spokesman for TelstraClear says existing internet customers can choose to remain on their current plans, which will continue to offer the data split.

He says the decision to remove the split from the InHome packages is part of the company's focus on profitability.