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I'll provide one data point of how this affects Canadian internet users. I currently have no caps with TekSavvy and pay $39 a month. Starting from March 1st, I
by acangiano 16y ago
I'll provide one data point of how this affects Canadian internet users.
I currently have no caps with TekSavvy and pay $39 a month. Starting from March 1st, I will pay $31.95/mo with a 25 GB cap. Any gigabyte over the limit will cost about 2 bucks.
Now, you can buy a block at discounted prices. According to TekSavvy, based on my internet usage, I will need to buy at least a 275 GB extra block. Believe it or not, I don't torrent. I simply like to watch NetFlix, HD movies from iTunes, lots of educational videos online, and backup data in the cloud.
That 275 GB block costs $55/mo. So I suddenly go from paying $39 for unlimited data to paying $86.95 per month, and having to be careful about what I download and what not.
Oh, and the first thing I need to do is stop backing up my data, videos, and photos in the cloud. That's pretty much out of the question with the risk of paying $2 per extra GB. I'm buying an additional external hard drive instead.
How is that for innovation?
- jacquesm 16y agoThere is a reason why lots of technical people from Canada seek to find their fortune in the United States.
- axod 16y agoIs the US really much better? As we saw earlier in the week from Netflix, slower average bandwidth than Canada... hardly any competition and so on. If you want decent internet connectivity, move to Europe or Japan or something. They're rolling out 100mbps broadband in the UK.
- Swannie 16y ago"They're rolling out 100mbps broadband in the UK." Not quite yet. http://www.eclipse.net.uk/fibre-broadband/what-is-fttc- http://www.eclipse.net.uk/fibre-broadband/what-is-fttc-
- axod 16y agohttp://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/up-to-100mb.html http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/up-to-100mb.html Some already have it. (My brother for one) Schedule of when areas will get it from Virgin: (Other providers may be different). http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf/100Mb-rollout-30111.pdf http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf/100Mb-r...
- Swannie 16y agoThanks, I'd not heard about this (only been back here for just over a month). This is excellent news, most places covered by the end of this year. Sadly Bristol is lacking!
- Locke1689 16y agoThat graph was a useless piece of shit. I have a feeling there's a bimodal distribution there, but can't even get a feeling for it because the graph was so poorly made. Seriously, a mean without a standard deviation? That's a failing grade in a first year statistics course.
- potatolicious 16y agoCanadian expat working in the US here. The situation in Canada continues to get worse, and was always behind even the relatively pokey US internet providers. It isn't necessarily about the size of the pipe, but rather unnecessary restrictions that negatively impact the way people use the internet. Here I'm on Comcast and have a fairy generous cap (250GB). If people start penny-pinching what they do with their bandwidth it will be the end of web-based industries as we know it. More accurately for Canada - it never began. Folks like myself who specialize in web-related development, either frontend or backend, basically have no future in our home countries. I hate to be so down about my own country, but it's the damned truth, though many Canadian developers are too proud to admit it. The software industry in Canada is anemic, grossly underpaid, and that goes doubly for anything web-related.
- sjs 16y agoThis situation really sucks, but remember that those of us with Telus or Shaw don't have anything to complain about at the moment so you aren't hearing about all of us on 10-25 mbps lines, with 50-200 GB soft caps that aren't enforced. I'm torrenting up a storm 24/7, and regularly download shows and movies on iTunes and Netflix, stream Grooveshark at home and on my phone. I don't even hear anything if I use 2x my monthly data transfer. Our upstream bandwidth is still terrible though :/ I don't envy the US at all, I envy Sweden, Japan, South Korea. No offence but I'd sooner move to many places before the USA. Don't get me wrong, the CRTC is worse than useless actively harming the tech landscape. We have zero competition with Internet and phone pricing at all, the big guys basically just fix prices because it's more profitable for them to collude than compete. We have a lot of major problems.
- jacquesm 16y agoShaw is cable right?
- delano 16y agoYep.
- EdwardCoffin 16y agoYes
- westajay 16y agoThey also operate their own internet backbone and sell access to corporate clients.
- sjs 16y agoIt may be just a matter of time before they follow suit. Who knows, it surely would not be a surprise.
- fyrerise 16y agoThis isn't accurate. Shaw has recently jumped on the same bandwagon and started enforcing hard caps with overage fees. Just go here if you want to check that: http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/High-Speed/ http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/High-Spee... ($2.00/GB for each GB used above plan’s limit) AFAIK, Telus isn't doing yet, but I've heard that this is a technical limitation rather than lack of desire to do so.
- wildmXranat 16y agoYep. Most online services that have a presence in Canadian market will start to see cuts in their revenue. I was using NetFlix, but no longer. Many of my friends and co-workers are not using Dropbox for backup anymore. It makes no sense. Many went back to good old fashioned portable drives. In addition to purchasing less of online services, many people that I know refuse to buy anything from Bell and Rogers. No cable, no landline phone, no satellite tv. In fact, with the new mobile companies popping up in the last 12 months, you can save quite a bundle. There is an angst growing amongst customers that spreads like wildfire. In past few years, I converted almost every one of my friends and relatives to Teksavvy internet. At that moment in time, it made sense. It no longer does and I wish that this turns up the heat enough to make it an election issue. It is, pardon my french, a fucking racket.
- samatman 16y agoA total OT, but is "pardon my French" at all PC in Canada? Serious question!
- GrooveStomp 16y agoI suspect it is. I've heard the term used and nobody's batted an eye. Could be because we're on the west coast, though.
- jarek 16y agoNever seen it as an issue in Ontario. It's not all that common, but it's not offensive either.
- fooandbarify 16y agoI'm French Canadian (well, half) and I've often heard other French Canadians use the same expression in French - "excuse mon français". I consider myself relatively plugged in to French politics here and I've never heard of it being an issue.
- wildmXranat 16y agoI haven't given it much thought, really. On a deeper level, it probably stems from communication roots of English and French languages colliding, where a foreign phrase would be mentioned, but you would apologize for saying it, just to be polite.
- Maxious 16y agoFYI in australia the pricing is pretty similar: 1.00 AUD = 0.994493 CAD, $40AUD = 40GB, $80AUD = 250GB, $100AUD = 350GB
- a_m0d 16y agoThat really depends on where you are - I live in a semi-rural area, 40kms out of Perth, and right on the border of 2 ADSL exchanges. We're not in range for either of them, so we have to resort to wireless internet: $80/month for 3GB on peak, 5GB off peak. There is nothing else available here (including 4G wireless).
- sygma 16y agoI'm in no way trying to hijack the thread, but where I live, I pay $45/month for a 4 GB cap and 2$ per extra gigabyte. Theoretically, I should get 512kbits per second. Practically, however, I'm getting an average of 300kb and a 200ms latency to US and EU servers. You want to know the cool part? I'm doing just fine. That is to say, if you take a step back and think about it, you could probably live off 25 GBs per months. Think of the poor souls half way around the world, that could probably help!
- uxp 16y agoWhere I live in the States, I pay $65 USD for 7MBit DSL with a 250GB softcap. I've only gone over the cap about 3 times in the 4 years I've been with my ISP, and it is never more than 300GB total that month, with the exception of this winter. I've also never had to pay for additional usage beyond my standard monthly bill. My average per month is about 80GB for last year, which is mostly consumed by a full level 0 dump once per month and weekly level 1 dumps of 3 remote BSD VPSes to a home server once a month, yet I still only consume about 1/3rd of my allotted bandwidth. My fiancé was between semesters at school this winter, and decided to finish watching Battlestar Galactica, among a couple dozen other movies to occupy her time through Netflix. My router's bandwidth logs show that she consumed about 35GB a day for 12 of her 15 days off. We hit somewhere under 500GB of data that month. Using TekSavvy's upcoming rates listed in this thread at $32.00 per month for 25GB with $2.00 per additional GB, we would have had a bill approaching $1,000.00. How the fuck is that justifiable? Our current model takes in account that occasionally, users will blow through their caps with no regard for the sky, but most other months are way below the cap. My current plan, of which was negotiated over 4 years ago and has not changed since, still serves my needs perfectly. I could cut out Netflix and my VPS backups and use 4GB a month, but why should I move to a service plan that is lesser than my 4 year old contract? Did I mention my current ISP service plan was negotiated 4 years ago? ISPs have had 4 years, in my case, to upgrade their equipment to accommodate an increase in users, of which they have been pushing, because as a company, they like having an increase in subscribers. Realizing now that they are at the peak and want more money for the increased traffic is entirely out of line since they have had years of growth in their subscriber base and years of blind profit, but none of that was spent ensuring that they would have additional room to grow. I would gladly pay a flat fee per GB of data, since theoretically it is more fair. I will not pay a flat fee that is approaching a 15 times increase profit for my ISP from what they paid for that GB. They gave me and every single other subscriber 250GB to use per month, and for the past 4 years, my habits have evolved to be aware and use 250GB of data per month. Cutting it back to 25GB and additional at $2/GB is entirely ridiculous. Moving backwards is not a solution.
- blub 16y agoSo much for 'the cloud' and ubiquitous broadband. Next time I see someone mention that such and such iPhone app can be made as a web app I'll point them here. Web apps are at the mercy of so many third parties...
- patrickaljord 16y agoWeb apps work offline too, that's the whole point of frameworks like sproutecore, backbone.js and sencha.
- jarek 16y agoWeb apps are not an issue unless media is involved. Media is the issue.
- natrius 16y agoHow many alternative providers do you have access to? If providers can actually make a decent profit from charging you $39 for that bandwidth, TekSavvy's competitors should be knocking down your door to split the difference. In theory. EDIT: I just read in another comment that it's Bell Canada metering charges for bandwidth resellers. That's a bit more complicated. Hm.
- Swannie 16y agoNot really, from the other comments it appears that Bell Ca is not the only back-haul provider. But as I said in another comment, ISPs got a whole 90 days to deal with this, which runs out about today. That's a pathetic amount of time to tender for alternative suppliers, especially over the holiday season, in Canada. (I hear it gets cold there???)
- Swannie 16y agoI misunderstood. They have from a few days ago for 60/90 days. And they don't really have many options, unless they go for a massive unbundling effort.
- jellicle 16y agoThe overage charges go directly to the line owner, what you would call an ILEC in the U.S. Thus there won't be any competition on the bandwidth side, and in fact the line owner has an incentive to maximize charges, which is exactly what we're seeing.
- forensic 16y agoIt's a government-enforced monopoly.
- neonfunk 16y agoI actually agree with metering; I think it's the only fair measure. Granted, the metering you describe sounds atrocious, and there'll probably be a long messy transition to the point where our internet bill is more like our electric bill. But imagine this: on mobile networks, instead of voice minutes, text messages, data caps, fees for tethering, and every other scheme the Telcos are concocting right now (with regard to charging for individual services), we instead have a single measure of our usage — data — and our bill starts at something reasonable like $5 or $10 a month. The problem with "unlimited" in my view is that it conditions us to think that said resource really is unlimited, versus, say, electricity where we are incentivized to be aware of our usage. Now, if they're going to charge $2 per GB above some arbitrary cap — that's clearly absurd. But to start the bill very low (for the basic connection), and then charge, say, 10¢ or 15¢ per GB? Sign me up.
- fluidcruft 16y ago"we are incentivized" Nice use of passive voice.
- jacquesm 16y agoA basic 20 Mbit connection goes for about $75 in Europe, that's 1.1 ct / Gigabyte (if my back-of-the-envelope math is correct). 40 Mbit goes for about $100 / month. Metered is out, flat-rate is the future. The only hold-outs will be the mobile carriers and even there I already see flat-rate offerings. $5 or $10 / month would not work due to fixed costs and write-off on equipment higher than that. But once the equipment is paid for you might as well use it to its full ability without being penalized further.
- Ras_ 16y agoN. Europe: I have 110/10M (cable-tv network) in Finland for $53. More widely available 24/1M DSL goes for $46. Usage caps are unheard of in cabled internet. Cheap, non-capped mobile internet has recently exploded - caps will be introduced. Our biggest telco TeliaSonera has only capped versions since the launch of iPhone (they were were forced and willing to pay extra). Other companies haven't introduced restrictions, but since Android-based smartphones became popular in 2010 and currently log the most data usage per unit, this will soon change. Mobile internet is also very popular with plain computers by using 3G usb-dongles, which telcos give free of charge when you sign up for 12/24 months. Typical offer is uncapped 384k for $6.7 or 1M for $12 (actual rates vary often due to congestion - p2p users are a major pain in the butt with 3G networks). These are available nationwide with no geological price differentiation. In Sweden broadband is quite much cheaper. The government has been heavily involved in building fiber with subsidies, tax breaks and legal requirements to municipal providers. (IT Bill 2000) http://www.broad-band.gr/content/events/docs/Swedish_broadband.pdf http://www.broad-band.gr/content/events/docs/Swedish_broadba...
- vacri 16y agoI've always thought it funny that people who use 250+GB of data class themselves as 'not heavy internet users'. "I don't torrent" != light internet use. What do most people torrent? Movies and TV. And yet there you are doing lots of HD video while claiming you're not a heavy user ("I don't torrent", "I simply..."). Out of curiosity, what level of bandwidth usage do you think quantifies a heavy user?
- junkbit 16y agoCheap hard disks have grown faster than the last mile of internet connections over the years, creating a bottleneck. I think people's expectations are tied to the large disks and the files that they hold.
- cookiecaper 16y agoNetflix, iTunes, Hulu, and YouTube are redefining heavy internet usage. My brother-in-law (who lives with us for the moment) recently got Netflix hooked up on his Xbox and he uses 10-11 GB if he watches all day or 5-6 if he watches for a few hours. My normal usage, downloading updates for my PCs (Arch Linux, so heavy ones come often), browsing, watching a handful of videos, doing git pulls, lots of text-heavy sites like HN and docs, etc. plus my wife's normal usage, which is YouTube and Facebook, usually ends up somewhere around 700MB-1GB of usage per day. When I torrented from home, the average consumption was maybe 2GB-4GB per day, so Netflix is even more taxing than that for me. As the web becomes increasingly media intensive, the "normal user" threshold of <100 MB per day is going to shoot up to something around <10-15 GB per day, especially once everyone in the house gets TV and movies over web-based services instead of cable/air/DVD. The cable companies, which incidentally are usually the only good residential ISPs, are going to lose cable subscriptions to Netflix subscriptions and on-demand rentals to iTunes rentals, and consequently we'll see moves like this one seeking to penalize net-based media providers since they take customers away from their TV offerings.
- acangiano 16y agoI never claimed to be 'not a heavy internet user'. Of course I am. I simply claimed that my data consumption is legitimate, and not caused by illegal hoarding of software, movies, etc.
- thebigredjay 16y agoWhere do you live? I've lived in Quebec for three years and before that Alberta. In both places my internet service had a bandwidth cap and above a certain amount you paid an extra fee per GB. This is absolutely not new! What really sticks out to me here is that the various ISP's have much less to compete with. The only real motivation for me in Montreal to switch to one of the smaller ISPs was the unlimited bandwidth option.
- wmoxam 16y agoI'll provide another data point (as someone who isn't as heavy a user as acangiano. I'm with Teksavvy as well and currently pay $31.95 + tax for a 200GB cap. I'm using less than half of that, or about ~80GB/month. Under the new rules I will have to pay $40.45 + tax for 105GB cap. In the rare (for me) case that might exceed this cap I'll pay $2/GB for additional traffic. If I cancelled Netflix I'd probably come in just under the 25GB cap. Bell has effectively doubled the price of Netflix for me.
- Groxx 16y agoSince you apparently now have to worry about metering, I've been very happy with this for more simple bandwidth monitoring: http://codebox.org.uk/pages/bitmeterOs http://codebox.org.uk/pages/bitmeterOs