Go back in time about a dozen years, and the majority of Australian Internet users were on dialup. Speeds, to put it kindly, weren't great, but we were at least (largely) removed from the era where ISPs gave you a set number of hours of dialup time. You might be disconnected at "peak times" if you'd been connected for too long -- or if a random seagull landed on a line somewhere, or something -- but you could, for the most part, download as much as your poky 56kbps connection could handle.
These days, the majority of Internet users in Australia are on a broadband connection of some kind, but (again, with certain exceptions) those plans are limited by the quantity of data you're permitted to shift around. Downloads isn't quite the right word there; the vast majority of plans count any data you upload against your quota. This makes picking a plan with enough data a rather vital consideration. Choose too little, and you'll either pay hefty excess fees (especially for mobile broadband) or get shaped down to speeds last seen in the dialup era. Choose too much, and you're paying for data you'll never use.
How much data does the average Australian use, anyway? The latest figures from the Australian Communications And Media Authority (ACMA) paint an interesting picture. Its latest report suggests that in the December 2010 quarter, the average fixed line (that's ADSL, ADSL2
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