So back in October, the government passed a proposal by Bell to allow, on-top of monthly charges, charge by usage after the given bandwidth is met. So it practically works like our cellular phone services, you're charged overages.
Bell is one of the major ISPs over at the east coast and some people say that the government is trying to not let outside companies to try and compete (and improve) our internet infrastructure, bringing down competition.
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2010/2010-802.htm
long read, tldr; for me.
But because of this, somewhere closer to us, Shaw has implemented a trial system of overage usage charges over at Edmonton.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Shaw-Confirms-Plans-To-Charge-Per-Gig-Overages-11113
They are potentially bringing it to all the provinces they service.
What does that means to a lot of us? We're for sure gonna hit the cap and they're gonna milk money off consumers. They are overcharging at around $2 a gig, now by my experience of renting servers at data centers, I can buy like an extra block of 1TB of premium bandwidth for probably less than 20 bucks a month, I pay for a shared 100mbit unmetered hub at 35bucks with a server per month thats in Germany. The theoretical cap is about 4000GB/4TB which works out to be around 115Gigs per buck at a data center. Although its different because shaw has to send the service to you and do the infrastructure, the difference is HUGE.
With new streaming services to Canada like Netflix, we are also going to have a higher usage because of streaming HD content. So the upfront cost of Netflix is 8bucks or so, but by using it, we're also using up our bandwidth, which besides from the monthly cost, now has the overage usage cost, so we'll need to factor in the cost per movie we're streaming in the total cost of Netflix. I would probably be better off renting at Rogers than wasting my bandwidth streaming. It is also not a fair trade if you think about it. You are streaming thus you are not recording (well you can but lets say you cant). The amount of bandwidth used is not equal to the amount of data you get to store on your hard drive. In a sense it becomes a waste of bandwidth because you cant use that same portion of bandwidth again from playback because it is streamed.
Digital distribution platforms, getting more and more popular these days. Now I buy a lot of games off Steam and always delete/reinstall because of limited hard drive space. With the change, I will think twice as each game can cost me around 6 gigs of bandwidth (Black ops was 6 gigs). So besides the fact of the delete/reinstall cycle, the initial download will cost bandwidth, I will probably not bother buying anymore games online because It'll cost me another 10 bucks or so to download it. I personally do not see the future of digital distribution and DLC with implementation of these charges. Hell I'll stop my PS3 from auto-updating stuff as well. This may discourage mp3 buying sites like itunes, I'm not paying 99cents anymore, I'm paying a dollar and some cents plus tax. iTunes rental? nope not doing it 2.99 + atleast another 4 bucks for HD.
So all this may somehow tie into Net Neutrality in some ways. A question to ask is if I am getting charged per Gigabyte, is there a reason to prioritize say emails, because I am paying to use that bandwidth. Should ISPs still packet shape your transfers even though you are paying per gigabyte to use it?
so the tl:dr of all this is that the government is pretty backwards I guess.
How does overage work here at the moment? In New Zealand they just put you down to dial up speed, at which point you can pay a top up amount to get more broadband. I think that is a great way to handle it.
ReplyDeleteAt the moment in Vancouver, only Telus have an overage charge statement on their terms, $2 per gig I believe it was, but Telus cannot monitor ADSL2 traffic yet (or maybe they can by now) thus in reality their 60GB or so BW cap (depending on plan) is never met because the meter is always 0. Shaw on the other hand doesn't have it stated in the terms for us but we are given bandwidth caps. They usually call you when you double it or so but they do not throttle your speeds and they simply "warn" you kinda thing. Their DOCSIS 3.0 cables i do not believe they meter those and the ones we get residentially should be DOCSIS 2.0s (cant remember off the top of my head).
ReplyDeleteDowntown has NOVUS or something, and they are, I believe unmetered or have really high bandwidth caps as they're like only found in downtown and are really fast.
I have heard from friends in Aus and NZ that you have bandwidth caps then you get kicked to dial up speed, I do believe its because of you guys being on an island and the underground cable may be expensive (and expensive traffic) but where as Canada is really part of an internet main backbone (and even if we're not, we're right next to it) bandwidth shouldn't be that expensive here.
Internet in Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea are all unmetered and reach fairly high speeds (with gigabit connections straight to homes in some situations). FIOS down in the US seems to be fairly unmetered (but I do think Comcast have caps/shape their packets badly) Would need an American to answer this really, I just find out stuff from my friends down there when chatting.
and i realized i did my tl;dr wrong