Interesting...

To answer thorfinn's question, in a completely unscientific manner :)

The download of the same file from vurt to home over bigpond and internode:

Bigpond cable: 46.20 KB/s
Internode ADSL: 29.35 KB/s

So Telstra is, at that time of day, for that file, half as fast again - particularly interesting given that vurt is also on the INternode ADSL network :)

However, Bigpond charge $10 a month more, for a 3 gig download limit (which we constantly blow, even being careful), and Internode have a 30 gig limit.

More data points:
--- vurt.net ping statistics ---
Internode: 14 packets transmitted, 14 packets recieved, 0% packet loss
round trip min/avg/max = 38.7/220.9/435.9 ms

Bigpond: 13 packets recieved, 11 packets recieved, 15% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 55.566/82.683/143.834

So bigpond is faster but crapper :)

To be fair, I think the packet loss is happening at lioness.

So the "shiny fast" effect is either my mind playing tricks on me, or it's limited to web pages (internode may have better transparent proxying)

sol.
.