Bell Canada Plans To Throttle Back On Useage
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Our friends to the north in Canada are facing a new throttle back program by Bell Canada that appears will cost consumers more. It appears that the new plan, once in place, will charge for those who go over a set limit per month on downloading. Though Bell Canada does not mention how much the overage charges will be, one can guess it will not be cheap. According to this p2pnet news article:
Just got back from the conference and here is what Bell is proposing.
512Kbps service will be limited to 2GB per month
5Mbps service will be limited to 60GB per monthThey did not disclose what the overcharges will be, but don’t expect it to be cheap. Simply put DSL as we know it right now will no longer exist.
We find this proposal to be totally unexceptable [sic]. The only good news is that it will not affect current clients. So as long as you don’t change ISP’s you can keep your current unlimited connection. Bell proposes to start shadow billing in October and usage based billing in Jan of 2009.
This has given me a new sense [of] urgency to setup our own equipment at the CO. I will be approaching a few other ISP in the next little while to see if we can come to some type of agreement. We prefer not to do this alone.
So it looks like Canada is facing some of the same problems we are facing here in the US. Which makes one wonder? Does making more money on the Internet for the ISP’s going to hurt the implementation of broadband?
What do you think?
Comments welcome.
5 Comments
JmactheAttack
July 31st, 2008
at 9:22am
Yeah I dont get the mindset of the CEO’s that run these large ISP corporations. I think they must be blind to what is going on outside this continent, consider how well Japan and some other countries are doing with their ’super’ broadband systems.
Ron, I really appreciate these articles that you produce on broadband throttling. I just cant wait to see one entitled “Time Warner Throttling Connections in Ohio”. That will be the day I get a new provider (if available lol).
Marcus Hamaker
July 31st, 2008
at 10:06am
Great… this is just the beginning. And although I use a competitor in Canada it takes one company to start and the others will follow suit. I am worried now.
Martin Kruse
July 31st, 2008
at 8:46pm
Hell, i use a few gig a day. Downloaded some demos, watched some Netflix crap and so on. And that’s just on one computer, we have 4 in the house.
system001
August 1st, 2008
at 6:43am
i am on comcast here with 6mbps and from the math i get 86400 second in a day, which would mean i am entitled to use up to 432,000 megabytes a day or 432 gigabytes per day, with an average of 12,960 gigabytes per month. if comcast throttled me down to only 60 gigabytes per month i would own them, because they are stealing service i paid for. i believe in comcast case it is less than 20% of their customers that come anywhere near their cap. plus as i said before with the way the systems are set up you cannot go over your cap. so comcast and all the other service provides here and in canada have nothing to cry about. just another game to ripoff their customers and not upgrade their systems.
GiM
August 10th, 2008
at 7:23am
True, agreed!
I am a Bell client and last year a saw some “shape-ing” of internet download. I still am with Bell, but I consider changing to other ISP.
This one I have in mind have limited traffic but really free - no-shape of internet access, and if you exceed the limit with extra $30/month - from this level will be unlimited, which means $50 high-speed limited + $30 unlimited = $80+ taxes and problem solved.
Since I am in this area between $50 and $80, I am waiting to see when I will have more “download limit” versus “shape control”, and I will switch…