Canada's internet is entering a dark age

This is getting ridiculous, the duopoly of Bell and Rogers is getting worse every month.

Stricter download limits on the way - moneyville.ca Blogs

I just switched over to teksavvy cable last september and for now it looks like my 200gb limit is safe, but im worried that it wont be like that for long.

Anyone else being affected? I for one do not want to have to go back with bell or rogers, but it seems like theyre trying to force people who left them to go back to them.

 

I read the link in your post. Duopoly indeed. I don't know what else to say. Calling internet customers that use more than "a couple of gigs per month" digitial packrats is absolutely ludicrous. I really feel for you guys up there, what they are pulling is totally anti-competitive and wouldn't fly here in the states. Although I can bet the US carriers are watching what's happening across the border very closely on this issue. Typing this from my truly unlimited dsl, and this still pisses me off what's happening up there.

 

I'm all against any transfer caps but I can (kind of) understand 200GB a month limit for an average consumer line, but 25GB/month!?
I transfer more or less 60-75GB a month on my private ADSL line (private as in I'm the sole user).
How do you buy steam games then? You download 12-16GB game and tell your family not to use youtube for two weeks

 

Techsavvy DSL for murdered. >_> I hope their cable service remains at 200GB as well, as I will be switching to them from Rogers (60GB) when my current deal is up. The industry minister have ordered a review on the CRTC decision and it looks like the government will be getting a hand into this.

 

Not being from Canada (and being too lazy to browse through ISP's websites) can I ask how much is it for this 25GB/month marvel (and at what speed)?

It brings back old memories from modem-times when you've had to watch what you do online so as not to go bankrupt.

 

$31.95 + tax, 5Mb/850Kb, DSL. I used that service that year too. The lines are rent from Bell by Teksavvy. Funny enough my family pay a similar price for 100Mb fibre internet at home (Hong Kong).

Currently I am on a 12 month contract with Rogers 10/0.5 for $55/mo (inc modem rental), I got first 3 months for free (comes to roughly $41/mo overall). Strangely enough I got a speed boost to 18Mb or so.......

 

It's not cheap so there's nothing to justify the transfer cap.
If it was dirt cheap I could at least rationalize that ISPs can't afford infrastructure upgrades with such low margins, so they want to limit the traffic- but with prices like that it seems they just want to increase their profits. No competition- no problem.
Where I live (EU) 8mbps down/1mbps up costs $19/month while 20mbps down/1mbps up costs $22/month (both on a two year contract, unlimited transfers, ADSL)- and ISPs make money on that.

 

It's not cheap indeed - comparable packages in the US typically are uncapped, unthrottled and range from 4-10 mb/s... then you have japan where $25 gets a damn 25mb line :|

The good news is that this has been snowballing since people started learning about this in Nov, and it just got mainstream media coverage yesterday, which of course stirs up our spineless politicians. It has a chance at being appealed since the liberal party is saying they want it revoked, so the conservatives will want to retain voters and do the same (even though they are in a way responsible for this in the first place!)

 

Ouch that makes me really jealous!

Here is an article from the major national newspaper in Canada outlining the outrageous profit margins of the telecom companies. It says that it only costs them $0.03 per gb, while they are charging on average $2.00 for each gb over your measly bandwidth cap. this is bordering on criminal, no other industry has such ludicrous markups.

What is a fair price for Internet service? - The Globe and Mail

 

i wish i could get sure west they got FTTP 90 bucks a month and its 10/10 :/ i get 10/1 for 55 bucks a month from charter.

 

I guess I'm a digital packrat. This household has far exceeded 2GB today. I would not be surprised if we have exceeded a terabyte in a single month.

That's odd. I never heard of anything other than a flat monthly fee in the old days of dial-up internet.

 

ISDN had either time limits or data limits. Also if i had a good upload i would host a ton of things. ^^

 

ISDN, unusual. When he said old memories of modems, the only thing that came to mind was dial-up.

 

Yes- I meant dial-up. You don't know how lucky you were.
Where I live dial-up used to cost like a local phone call- so you paid for the time you were online and that could significantly increase the figure on the phone bill

 

This will soon be overturned it seems. There are rallies going on in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa to stop the madness. I would post a bunch of videos, but there are too many lol.

 

Yep like I said once the media got into it, the politicians had to play the game or lose 250k+ voters (whoever failed to take action would).

Also my info from japan is old apparently - a friend tells me that he's actually paying what I am now (~35$), but he has a 200mbps, unmetered bandwidth line. Our ISP's here are happy to get 1 gig crossover hubs (that are supposed to serve 50,000+ people each) when 5 dudes in japan have equivalent speed.

 

democracy in action, shows what can happen once the ball gets rolling

Ottawa to reverse CRTC Internet billing decision - Moneyville.ca.

looks like teksavvy (and me) will be safe for a while to come.

 

I am with Bell:

Features - Bell Internet: Essential Plus

Windows 7 updates already exceed my cap each month. This plan should not even be legal ...

 

Yep, I remember my roomate telling me our long distance was only a few cents a minute. By the time the bill arrived and we found out the contrary, I had racked up with two $300 phone bills. That was on top of the $20 or $40 internet fee.

Luckily we got a local dial up provider shortly after that.

2gigs of bandwidth per month is USELESS on a computer these days.
That's barely enough for a smart phone. Updates, email and barely any web browsing will exceed that on a computer.

What really kills me, is that of all the places for these companies to save money, bandwidth is the worst. Bandwidth is cheap and costs no labor but hurts your customers in an obvious way.

 

I pay 41.95$/mo @ 65GB/mo from Bell.

If I go over the cap, which I always do, I'm charged up to 71.95$/mo for a 200GB/mo cap (30$ max over-cap or 2$/per GB, whichever comes first - over 200GB is 2.50$/per GB). It's absolutely disgusting, to be honest, that an ISP can get away with it.

There isn't a big selection where I currently live so I have no choice.

...this is for DSL. I generally use 2.5GB/day from gaming and HD streaming.

I wish American and European companies would enter the Canadian market and slaughter Bell/Rogers.

 

It sucks that Canada had this happen to them. Is the internet considered a public utility?

But for us Americans, ISPs will try something similar along these lines (already going forward).
Stay informed of "Net Neutrality" and push your politicians to keep the internet a public utility.

 

Just don't take it anywhere near politics if you want this thread open.

 

Comcast has had a 250GB up and down total data usage cap since 2008, so caps are nothing new, unfortunately.

 

But that isn't a cap like it is in Canada, but just they will warn you if you go over, and eventually possibly cut out your internet, right? You'd never get a bill for a ridiculous amount, right? I like Verizon Fios the way it is right now.

 

Yep the 25Gb cap plan was killed and they will block bell forcing anything on to resellers.

If the still with bhell .. just step over to teksavvy
If you with robbers just check if teksavvy offering cable in your area.

 

I did about 700GB on my Comcast connection in the November-December period and I haven't received any notices. So even that 250GB is pretty loose...

 

If Bell's motion goes through teksavvy won't save you. Teksavvy piggybacks on Bell's broadband network and the new motion allows Bell to charge per GB to BOTH users and other ISPs hooked onto their network. That means that if teksavvy offers you a high bandwidth cap, they'll have to pay it to Bell too and chances are they'll charge you since they can't get magic money from nowhere.

However people(including the government) are fighting the motion so there may yet be hope. A first revision is due soon.

 

Disagree with your first paragraph. I know of many families in my area that do not use more than 2GB/month, yes, I have their Rogers bills since I've helped them set up their accounts. Majority of users in my parents residential area can surf all they want with this amount. Even with my parents using youtube often, they don't go much over. I agree with your 2nd paragraph, IMO if UBB is to make internet a utility like power and water, then there should be a much lower minimum charge for a base internet connection (ie. speed), then the cost per GB should be a few cents and charge everything. It would definitely be more fair, but the companies will most likely lose money compared to what they are making now.

Currently in Canada, say you have a 25GB cap (say that's $35/mo). Your ISP can charge you a maximum up to $50 above what you pay for monthly if you go over (ie. $2.50/GB up to $50). So anything past 50GB and it's the same cost ($85 for that month).

 

I disagree with your disagreeing with her claim... errr... whatever

2GB/month is 68MB/day. I just watched a youtube video with a download meter on- it was 32MB (3min 37 sec long 480p video).
I'm sorry but you can't use youtube often with 68MB per day cap- that's 7minutes a day and no MB left for anything else (and even this is assuming there's no upload at all involved)

 

sometime i do over 1 gb per day wit a such rating i'd pay an extremely overpriced amount

but i don't think they will be able to get such high rate

 

When I'm not at my parents home, their last three months of usage has been at 2GB/month according to Roger's records online. Heck, I reset my dad's iPhone 3Gs and since he got the plan in Sept. 2009, he's only used 700MB of data total (he has 500MB/month). All I'm trying to say is that if you take into account all users that are using internet from any large provider, majority of their users do not use a lot of bandwidth. That said, I don't believe in these bandwidth caps - if you're going to do usage based billing, then every GB should just be charged at a fair price (even at an expensive $0.20/GB, 200GB would only be $40) to keep it like other utilities.

 

Teksavyy owns it's own hardware .. it is just using bells copper since NO ONE else got built out phone line network.
But now teksavvy offers cable over rogers and wireless in some areas.

But it sux for bell .. he owns the copper ... but the country owns the land ..

And no the 25Gb cap idea was killed ... and now bell is under a big microscope by every media and politicians.

 

Last I heard (sometime around 2009), Verizon had spent $18 billion rolling out FiOS, and at that time, FiOS only reached about half of the US. There's no way a small ISP like Teksavvy would ever be able to afford such an expenditure. Even if every single Canadian ISP not named Bell/Rogers/Shaw/Telus were to pool their resources, it's still highly unlikely they'd be able to raise the capital needed to lay a nationwide fiber network without heavy government subsidies.

What Canada needs is a national internet plan for the 21st century. In many European and Asian countries where internet access is fast and cheap, the government heavily subsidized the initial infrastructure 10+ years ago and as a result retains the right to dictate whatever rules they want regarding the leasing of lines.

 

They would probably ban me all together in Canada. Today is Feb 5th and here is my "light" consumption so far:

February 2011 (Incoming: 39115 MB / Outgoing: 825 MB)

I use DD-WRT on my router so it has the traffic feature there. Yesterday I used 2.3GB and i wasn't home obviously, work then came home and checked some emails, browse some forums and watched a few videos. Today I did download some bigger files and also was home most of the day. My friend came over also and she was watching videos on youtube. So far i'm at 8.05GB for the day, this is without really trying either. There are days when we watch Netflix in HD and Hulu and other streaming stuff and that alone pushed 15GB between a Wii and Laptop and Roku.

I'm on Optimum Online with the 30/5Mbps package for $44 but i was on the normal 15/2Mbps package till just 2 days ago for $29.95/month

 

If that ever makes it's way to the US I would pull the plug and go WiFi at the local Mickey D's. So far my Verizon DSL has NO cap and I hope it stays that way.

 

That reads, 1000Mbps fibre to the door, 2yr plan, $65 CAD/month. >_> Oh I wish I was at home right now.

I do hope CRTC will revise the decision, good thing the government noticed the petition (which I signed).

 

!!! Damn, if only we could have something 1/10th as good as that in canada. that is unreal and i am getting all the more jealous hearing about everyone's great plans.