Metered internet arrives in Canada...

And our largest carrier wants to charge us $2.00 for every gigabyte over the base cap of 25Gb/month that they're imposing on us. It costs them less than a penny to handle a gigabyte of data. I know, it's Canada; America's hat, but if it can happen here it can happen down there too.

On the one hand, this could force temperance on some torrent hounds, Lord knows some people need it. On the other hand, that's a lot of money for not a lot of bandwidth in present standards. This could put a big dent in services like Steam, one of the few things keeping PC gaming from going under. Netflix and perhaps iTunes purchases too.

Full story here.

Possibly not.

Where is everyone getting this cap of 25GB? The average household usually has just regular highspeed which is between 6-10mbps depending on which company

Telus Highspeed - 75GB
Shaw Highspeed - 60GB
Rogers Highspeed - 60GB

My household's average usage is about 50GB per month, we do about 5+hrs per day online gaming, we watch on average maybe 2-3 HD netflixs movies per week sometimes more, download music from both itunes and frostwire on a regular basis and we have an xbox, ps3, laptop, pc, and 2 iphones and at least 2 out of those devices are constantly connected to the internet and in use by someone. Most households will fall under their caps.

Another similar story
CRTC will rescind ‘unlimited use’ Internet decision – or Ottawa will overturn it

However it says:

From what that says even if they overturn there will still be metered usage from the big companies.

I don't understand why you think the President would have anything to do with corporate decisions.

Example: AT&T capped the unlimited data plans for smartphones to 2 GB. This was a corporate decision - not a Presidential decision. I can only imagine this decision was made to ensure more revenue for the corporation as data usage is going up.

This is just one example of why the CE boards have been failing over the years. Somebody posts a thread, and then one (or more) people find a way to drag unrelated subjects into it. It creates unnecessary drama.

So you don't like Obama. Great, state your opinion (when/where applicable). I don't care for "professional" wrestling at all but aside from this example, I'm not going to bring it into unrelated discussions.

Back on topic:

I have Comcast for a cable/phone company and my rep (it's a commercial account) mentioned that I won't be affected by any upcoming caps. I asked him, "What cap?" and he stated that they have been implementing 250 GB caps for a couple of years for residential accounts in select cities, and there are talks about further capping due to the high use of bandwidth.

Amazing. I would like to sit in on a lecture where you explain how the American political system works.

Good stuff.

Netflix alone likely makes up 25Gb of that, according to their own FAQ page. Any household that has more than one person viewing lots of YouTube videos is likely to come close to the cap. While many households will not reach it, it's still be a pitiful amount of bandwidth for the price that's being imposed.

Then again, I ponder if this has already been blown out of proportion. The worst that would happen to the end user is they would have to exercise some restraint with their internet usage. For some people, like my roommate, all this would mean is he can't download every fucking show on television in at least 720p format all the time. Part of me feels that the availability of cheap, fresh electronic media every waking moment is a luxury that we've been taking for granted for a while now.

Then again, again, this kind of metered billing is just an unnecessary corporate price-gouge.

So, when faced with an example of why an unregulated free market could potentially make bad or unpopular decisions, he turns around and complains about the government's propensity for regulation? Wow. Wow.

This.

Mostly this. Some smaller internet providers have packages for unlimited bandwidth. Almost all of those (from what I understand) are just bought from the larger providers (who own all the infrastructure). It was a way to force smaller companies to charge more.

It also opened up the potential for providers to circumvent net neutrality by exempting their exclusive content from their bandwidth charges. It`s a hypothetical slippery slope situation but it`s something I`ve heard thrown around a few times.

Bollocks. My hubby does online gaming for maybe an hour a day, if he has time (2 - 3 hours a day on the weekend), my kids and I surf the net (they aren't allowed to download or stream, and I rarely think to), and we watch maybe 5 - 6 movies in a month, and last month we went over by 20 GB (under an allotment of 60). Needless to say, I upped our package to 125 GB, but it is very easy to go over if one is using Netflix.

I had to laugh though - I signed the petition, and now I'm getting e-mails from Michael Ignatieff

More like Bollocks to your statement, if you watch 5-6 movies and lets say in HD each 2hr movie is about 3.5-4GB each (SD is about 1.8GB) so that means you use about 24GB per month for netflix. Online gaming weighs heavily on the game your playing for data transfer but on average most games are about 50MB/hr, so if you do about 40hrs/month thats only 2GB how could you possibly be going over 60GB/month?

It would not surprise me to learn that Tony Clement has no idea what a gigabyte is.

Fucking awesome.



I'm glad the feds told them that this shit ain't gonna fly, and the fact that there are political parties who claim they want to increase the availability of high-speed internet across the nation is encouraging.

I have no idea! It's bullshit. It seems like everyone I know that has Bell or Rogers doesn't run into this problem, but I do with Cogeco. I asked a bunch of people I knew that do similar stuff, after I read your post, and it seems like none of them have this issue, so it must be a Cogeco issue. Not sure how I would deal with it though, is there a way I can track my own up/downloading?

(Sorry for the OT)

This may be a stupid question but do you have a wireless connection and if so is it password protected? Or is your password really easy to guess? Maybe your neighbors are using your connection?

Install a copy of NetWorx. It does a pretty good job.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

Monthly Usage Trend Example

More on topic ... I don't know if metered usage is necessarily a bad thing, and my view is it depends quite a bit on implementation details.

25 GB seems to me a very low base cap in this day and age as more information and entertainment are transitioning to digital formats, and resolution continues to improve (hence, more data being transferred).

My jaundiced gut feel is carriers suggesting metered usage are attempting to find a base cap where, at this point in time, sufficiently few people will be up in arms, but (if the $2.00 charge versus $0.01 cost per GB is true) enough to rake off a hefty profit.

We're password protected, and it's definitely not easy to guess. It's a 9 digit number that means nothing to anyone except me. I'm the only one who has the password; even the hubby and the kids don't have it!

Check husband's "Not Porn" file.

LMAO

More like my "Not Porn" file

Thx, BellyJack, for the tip WIll it track from all devices connected through the router?

If a copy is installed on each computer on your network and synchronization is enabled then effectively yes.

Yeah, high performance 640Gb HDDs are less than $70 CAN nowadays. Even if a household used up the entire 25Gb allowance every single month by downloading media to their drive, it would take over two years to fill that up. I don't see any household with two net-saavy teenagers consistently staying under that cap.

I used to wonder if ISPs placed bandwidth caps because they didn't foresee all of their customers downloading gigabyte-sized files on a regular basis all the time, or if they're just arbitrarily imposing limits to force people to pay for more expensive plans. As soon I expressed this out loud to somebody I realized how silly it was to wonder about because of how obvious the answer is.

I think, without a doubt, that the price didn't match the level of service that Bell was about to impose.

Does your browser clear its history every time you close it? I've set up Firefox to clear everything whenever I close it, but it just occurred to me that I could be wasting a lot of bandwidth because it has to re-cache every site I visit every time I start a new browsing session.

What about gaming consoles? We've got a PS3 and 2 360's set up with online access right now (and, of course, that's how we access our Netflix).

@ Nelkoreth, I know mine doesn't, but the kids' might... and my computer isn't working right now, so I've been using the kids laptops and using the InPrivate option (so my favourite porn site isn't popping up on their address bars ).

You guys just have too much stuff.