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I’m going out on a limb. I think Optus is going to be giving more than just iPhone users unmetered access to Apple’s Internet properties.

Yesterday I downloaded Season 2 of the best TV ever.

Thankfully HBO have been gradually adding seasons of The Wire to the US iTunes Music Store, and I’ve been buying them and making my way through them.

I was a bit concerned with how big a season is. 7.5GB is a good chunk of my 30GB quota. Not too big a deal but last month iTMS Daily Shows & Colbert Reports, work VPN and random tinkering put me over the 20GB mark.

I checked the Optus web-based usage meter how much of my quota I had used in the first 5 days of July: About 2.5GB.

I set off and downloaded four episodes. About 2.5GB of files. When they had finished downloading I waited a couple of hours and went back to check the Optus usage meter. It had registered 259MB of activity. Maybe it was being particularly slow to update. Anyway, I downloaded the remaining 5GB, watched two episodes and went back to check my usage: 3.8GB.

Curious.

Because I needed to put one of my Office 2007 Home licenses on the kids’ PC, I downloaded it (298MB) and checked usage again: 4.1GB and holding steady.

7.5GB of “The Wire” from iTunes cost me about 1.3GB in usage quota. 298MB of installer from Microsoft (via Digital River) cost me about 298MB of quota.

Cue Twilight Zone theme.

I’ve hunted through my contract and I can’t see anywhere where it says Apple is some Internet usage metering haven. My only explanation is that Optus can’t, or won’t, just give iPhone users free access to Apple Internet resources and they’re engineering their network to treat everyone like an iPhone user.

I can’t think of any explanation for why Optus is charging me somewhere between full rate and zero in quota. Is there something I’m missing? Secret Optus brownie points for not using BitTorrent? Most people who complain about the Optus usage meter say it over-counts their traffic.