What Happened when TelstraClear Removed Data Caps?

During the recent weekend, TelstraClear [New Zealand] let its broadband customers to enjoy unlimited service ("unmetered").

This was announced on November 28 (here) saying that "TelstraClear is letting kiwis surf the web, watch video and email to their heart’s content all the first weekend in December. From 6pm on Friday 2 December until midnight on Sunday 4 December, data used by TelstraClear residential broadband customers will be free." 

Well, the weekend is over, and Truenet, a "company dedicated to the accurate measurement and reporting of broadband measurement" shared with the public the results:

"TrueNet analysed the impact on our TelstraClear probes, both Cable & ADSL. The impact was clearly evident, but of little concern, even though TelstraClear National speeds reduced by almost 40% for ADSL customers and 64% for Cable customers .. The charts shows that TelstraClear Cable speeds reduced to almost exactly the same as TelstraClear ADSL speeds. This is what we would expect, ie the speed has reduced to the available capacity, with both technologies having equal access to capacity and thus having equal speeds".

".. TrueNet's interpretation is that TelstraClear's experiment with unlimited broadband was a success with average speeds ranging from 3.3Mb/s to 7Mb/s with a limited number of outages".

TelstraClear was very happy to adopt the above statement. In a press release (here) the ISP said that "Customers used two and a half times more data overall than the previous weekend. Total usage was 359 terabytes (TB), 216 more than the weekend before, and enough to completely fill 216 large computer hard drives".

Steve Jackson (pictured), TelstraClear head of consumer markets, said that "We expected customers to take advantage of this opportunity and were upfront from the start .. We made substantial increases in our national and international capacity before the weekend, and put further capacity in place when the demand exceeded this .. We acknowledge that some customers were unhappy with their internet experience, just as we note that many have reported they didn’t mind slower speeds because they were able to use far more data than they otherwise would"