In response to the recent influx of competitive plans with high monthly data quotas, Simon Hackett, managing director of Internode, says that the service provider will provide "substantial" upgrades to its broadband plans. Hackett, who said that it would take a few weeks before an official announcement is released, made the comments to users of an online forum.

"Despite having only just revised its plans a few weeks ago, Internode will indeed respond commercially to various significant changes in the marketplace since then... We're currently waiting on some answers to important and relevant questions from various suppliers over the next few weeks, before we can fully determine and release our next plan revisions," Hackett said, thereby settling opposing speculation over the plans.

Hackett said that the plans may be offered upon the resolution of pricing agreements with Telstra Wholesale. Internode currently uses Telstra Wholesale's equipment to resell ADSL2+ in areas where it has not installed its own DSLAMs.

Hackett said that in order to avoid disappointing customers and fueling incorrect speculation, the company would not discuss specifics of the potential plans before they are released.

Currently, the company offers a maximum quota of 240 gigabytes per mont. The figure pales in comparison to the one terabyte and more plans earlier announced by service providers such as iiNet, iPrimus and TPG. The highest quota plan is currently being offered by iPrimus. The company has a plan that provides 1100GB of total monthly data.

The plans are not expected to see significant uptake and transitions for the next week or two. TPG will be switching on its scheme starting next month. Most of the new plans on offer will count upload and download data toward the quota.

The renewed competitive battle between Internet service providers was started by iiNet. The company will likely offer its terabyte plans in place of the unlimited plans offered by former competitor AAPT. Iinet bought AAPT this month from Telecom NZ in a deal worth $60 million. In an interview with Computerworld Australia, Michael Malone, the telecommunication company's chief executive, said that the cost of maintaining unlimited plans were too high for its user base. Malone adds that the unlimited plans would be the first thing to cut as soon as users of AAPT are transitioned to iiNet's network.

"On AAPT's cost base they lost money [on the unlimited plan]. iiNet's cost base is a lot less than AAPT's and they are still drastically loss-making," he said.

Malone calls the movement of some local ISPs to unlimited plans as an aberration. He says the global trend have most providers from moving back to offering capped plans.

"When you have an unlimited download environment the consumer increases their usage then the content owner and network owner bitch at each other over who is going to cover the cost of that. We don't have that issue in Australia as the cost of incremental traffic is borne by the consumer who gets the most utility from it," he said.

"Unless your personal circumstances have changed between yesterday and today such that you were happy yesterday but today you can't live without 1000GB's [sic] of downloads per month, then it seems to me that you could give Internode the benefit of the doubt for the same month or two that it took iiNet to respond to market shifts made by Internode and others," Hackett said in an online post.

Internode is attempting to improve its public image after Malone was quoted as saying the company "wasn't a meaningful player" in the market. He later defended his statement by saying that he was discussing "consolidation and size." Internode's failure to produce new plans may put further pressure on the company.