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Internet Downloading Costs To Rise In Canada

Posted by Soulskill on from the all-that-hockey-streaming-gets-expensive dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to CBC News, 'Surfing and downloading from the internet is about to get more expensive for many Canadians as internet companies Shaw and Primus have announced plans to impose new fees and caps on internet usage. Over the past year, the CRTC, Canada's communication regulator, let Bell and Rogers start charging extra for customers who download a lot of data. ... Primus and Shaw have said they will begin passing on higher fees to their customers beginning Feb. 1. Primus, for example, rents bandwidth on Bell's networks and said Bell is inflating the costs for everyone, including them. 'It's an economic disincentive for internet use,' said Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus. 'It's not meant to recover costs. In fact these charges that Bell has levied are many, many, many times what it costs to actually deliver it.'"

1 of 433 comments (clear)

  1. rural Canada by agwis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I am sick to death of how horrible the industry is in Canada, and the CRTC is not our friends either. I pay $150 per month for satellite internet as I live in rural Canada and don't have any other options...well dial-up, but I don't consider that an option. When I first heard of Netflix coming to Canada I was excited, but not anymore. I won't be able to use it. That's with a $150 per MONTH plan! This plan I'm on is xplornet's second best offering (Kabang). I recently received information from them about how they control are bandwidth usage, through what they call Fair Access Policy (FAP). Here is an excerpt:

    On your service the Fair Access Policy is based on an hourly bandwidth allowance. If you exceed your hourly download or upload allowance, your service will go into “Recovery Mode”. While in Recovery Mode, your speed will be restricted to a maximum of 25% (download) or 50% (upload) of your normal maximum speed.

    Recovery Mode will continue for sixty minutes. At the end of sixty minutes, the system will reevaluate your usage over the prior 60 minutes. If that usage is below the hourly allowance, Recovery Mode will end and your speed will no longer be restricted.

    I apologize for not formatting this table below in a better fashion. It appears I can't use tables in Slashdot's HTML.

    Telesat Service Package Maximum Speeds and Hourly Bandwidth Allowances

    Package | Maximum Download Speed | Maximum Upload Speed | Hourly Download Bandwidth Allowance | Hourly Upload Bandwidth Allowance
    Kazam | 512 | 128 kbps | 24 MB | 2.4 MB
    Basic | 1.0 Mbps | 128 kbps | 55 MB | 5.5 MB
    Kazoom | 1.0 Mbps | 256 kbps | 55 MB | 5.5 MB
    Kabang | 1.5 Mbps | 300 kbps | 88 MB | 8.8 MB
    Kaboom | 2.0 Mbps | 500 kbps | 110 MB | 11 MB

    It gets better....

    As well, there is an additional policy that affects all customers on your platform. This policy operates only during peak hours (between 8am and 1am local time). During this time, we subject traffic related to applications that are considered non time-sensitive (such as peer-to-peer file sharing, including BitTorrent-type applications, news groups, and online data storage (e.g. Rapidshare) to a peak transfer speed of 3% of the unrestricted maximum speed on your package.

    In addition, on March 1st 2011 we will be introducing a dynamic congestion management policy . This dynamic policy will respond to congestion in a part of the network by identifying those users in that part of the network who are consuming the most bandwidth and reducing their speeds to approximately half their maximum speed for a period of 15 minutes. At the end of 15 minutes, if congestion in that part of the network continues to be an issue, the system will once again calculate which users have been consuming the most bandwidth in the prior 15 minutes, and implement the speed restriction on that newly-calculated set of users.

    I'm completely disgusted by this whole industry and their price gouging. What's worse, there is no competition really. I can't even tell xplornet to shove it and go elsewhere.

    I may respond to future replies of my post here, but you'll have to excuse me for at least an hour or so until I wait out 'Recovery Mode'! ;)