It never fails to amaze me at the shoddy way that some Australian telcos decide to implement rate-limiting on Internet connections. The way that this is done is, send as fast as you can, then drop everything. Rinse, repeat, so that over a period of time, you get the rate that is advertised by the ISP. This is broken, because it means that you cannot properly share an Internet connection, even just for one person. For example, one could be legitimately uploading a bunch of photos online, and web-surfing at the same time. The photos will be sent as fast as TCP will allow, and then, everything will be suddenly cut. When you browse and send an HTTP request, it never gets through because everything is cut until the rate-limiting effect wears off. Hence, you are left with a pretty poor experience.

Seriously, do these people employ people who got their CS degrees off the back of a Cornflakes box, or do they just plain try to get away with getting people to pay for the privilege of being pissed off at them for acting like complete jerks?