Fruitbowl - Fresh Ideas from Hawke's Bay

Here is a clever promotion from Telecom.

Free uploads for the summer holidays

From now until the end of January, all Telecom home broadband customers will be able to upload whatever they want without affecting their monthly data allowance.

Many consumers haven't yet experienced the benefits of strong data in the cloud. Photo's on Flickr etc, so this may be a useful promotion for people to see that.

However as it's limited to a few months many people just won't bother.

Our data charges are creating a digital divide between NZ and other countries.

What is the most valuable things in your house?  What couldn't be replaced in a fire? Probably your digital pictures and videos of your kids.  Yet almost no one backs up this irreplaceable data in the cloud, because these large files eat your monthly data cap.

This will get even worse when true Netbooks arrive next year where everything is stored in the cloud.  You'll have no choice but to push data into online services as there is minimal storage on the devices. With a lack of online storage services in NZ that will be all international traffic. So we have the potential that data charges will kill the adoption of these pending very low cost devices - meaning students and others just miss out.

I was at a Telstra store in Sydney last week and they have small PC's on a $69 per month data contract for 2 years - for free. Sign a contract, free laptop.

However, this is a useful and clever promotion by Telecom. I hope it stimulates people to try.