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Bell Canada To Stop Internet Throttling
inject_hotmail.com writes "I just caught wind of a story over at the Huff. Bell Canada has written a letter to the CRTC indicating that it will end traffic shaping on March 1, 2012. Although Bell says that this is due to "increasing popularity of streamed video and other traffic" and 'P2P file-sharing, as a proportion of total traffic, has been diminishing,' it's far more likely that they are interested in higher revenue. In all likelihood, the change of heart is based on the fact that Bell has moved most of their customer base to, and offer no alternative to, low-usage-cap UBB packages, which would ultimately generate more income or deter full usage of their service (and thus require less infrastructure investment)."
Aborting throttling is definitely a good thing.
However the caps and overage fees are definitely an issue, and I can see this being part of a plan to get that bandwidth used up earlier, and collect the overage fees. Dirty, but we should know better than to assume they're doing something for the good of the customers.
I'm still dreaming of the day when the physical layer is run by an agency that has no relation to the provider, and the provider of your choice can hook up at the CO.
The current setup is too much of a conflict of interest, and they'll want low caps so people use their TV services and such. This should never be...
Sent from my PDP-11
finally got it through their heads to listen to the users and the common good?
No, they finally understood that at the rate current legislation is going around the world, there will be nothing worth downloading in a couple years anyway.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So, for what this means, here is some data on pricing and data caps:
Essential Plus - Speeds up to 2Mbps - $34 per month
2GB of bandwidth per month
= 2.27 hours of usage per month
Performance - Speeds up to 6 Mbps - $44 per month
25GB of bandwidth per month
= 9.5 hours of usage per month
Fibe 6 - Speeds up to 6 Mbps - $44 per month
25GB of bandwidth per month
= 9.5 hours of usage per month
Fibe 12 - Speeds up to 12 Mbps - $54 per month
50GB of bandwidth per month + $5 per 40GB
($1.50 per GB not prepaid)
= 9.5 hours of usage per month
Fibe 16 - Speeds up to 16Mbps - $64 per month
75GB of bandwidth per month
= 10.7 hours of usage per month
Fibe 25 - Speeds up to 25Mbps - $74 per month
125GB of bandwidth per month
= 11.4 hours of usage per month
Basically, Bell figures that you will use the full capacity of your connection about 10 hours a month or so.
1. Sell product with *unlimited bandwidth usage. *Restrictions may apply. ... repeat...
2. Implement traffic shaping because of overselling actual available bandwidth
3. Change everyone's plans to tiny, capped plans
4. Announce new *unlimited bandwidth usage plans and upsell existing customers. *Restrictions may apply.
Traffic-shaping is a bad thing.
Don't be an idiot. Traffic shaping is fundamentally necessary to manage a network whose capacity is less than demand (basically any public network). Abusive and discriminatory traffic shaping is a bad thing.
It has a cap at 50GB a month (which is already pretty generous)
You have an interesting idea of "generous". Two hours of Netflix a day and your cap is gone.
I live in a relatively small city in Idaho and just signed up for a 50Mbps (seriously... and I really do get that!) for ~$50 a month (this is with CableOne in case anyone is interested).
It has a cap at 50GB a month (which is already pretty generous) but it also has a couple of other niceties:
1. If you go over it's only 50 cents per gigabyte... which I think is pretty fair.
2. Any traffic between midnight and 6 AM is completely unmetered. So if you have a big download to do (like a new game on Steam) just start it after midnight and you're good to go.
Overall I'm extremely happy with the service. Streaming over Vudu and Netflix is awesome... downloading game patches happens instantly... And my wife can listen to Pandora while I play an online game without issue.
Hopefully more parts of the country will get service like this.
50GB is generous for a 50Mbps connection? That's only 3 hours of downloading at your full bandwidth. Or 25 hours of HD Netflix streaming (less than an hour per day). Or 10 DVD ISO's.
Comcast's 250GB limit seems much more reasonable, even if I "only" get 15Mbps
Do you work for Cableone?
That's why I'm on TekSavvy. They offer the same speeds at slightly lower prices but with a 300GB cap. They even have a 5M/unlimited plan.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
Bell is not going to do anything - ANYTHING - unless they believe they can squeeze every possible dime out of their customers. This is a company hellbent on profits at the cost of anything remotely approximating good business. Worse, they are a company that still thinks they have a monopoly and acts like it. And, worst of all, too many Canadians are willing to let them when there are many better options available. I'd go with Rogers (who I loathe) a million times over before going with Bell...
Believe me, the only reason they're doing this is they did the math and they believe they can screw their customers over better this way. I believe someone else in the thread supplied math that demonstrates this rather nicely...
Don't for a second think that Bell is doing something good - they are screwing customers every chance they can. They are the worst sort of the greed-corporations...