Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Users in our Bell Canada forums note that the Canadian incumbent telco has lowered the monthly rate of several of their tiers, but they've countered that by lowering customer usage caps as well. A look at the Bell website reveals that the company lowered usage limits on all their tiers, in addition to raising the overage cap penalty limit (at $1 per gigabyte) an additional $20, to $80 per month in maxiumum usage penalties."

Bell Canada recently made the news that it would no longer apply throttling to its customers later this year. Well, the other shoe has dropped and it seems that with this change comes some pricing changes. The ISP has dropped prices, but also lowered limits on its packages. Go over your data cap and get slapped with a fine. I cannot say this is not wholly unexpected. I would think this is a rather transparent attempt to draw more money from its customers as the Internet replaces other services. The part that makes me wonder is while connection speeds are going up, it is suspicious that the data limits are not increasing appropriately, and are even shrinking. Personally, I would rather have a larger data cap with the same speed, than some of the faster speeds offered. What about you?

"Today marks the beginning of AT&T's limited monthly data allotments for subscribers to its DSL and U-Verse broadband Internet services."

These days, it seems everything is connected to the web. From refrigerators to picture frames and everything in between, all of our new toys require some sort of data connection. That tie to the web is typically via a wireless link to a router with a DSL, cable, fiber or U-Verse provider.

If your provider happens to be AT&T, you will now need to keep tabs on your data usage as today marks the first day of AT&T's implementation of monthly data allowances. If you are a DSL subscriber, your monthly data allowance is 150 GBs. If you are a U-Verse subscriber, your monthly data allowance is 250 GBs. Notifications will be given when subscribers reach 65, 90 and 100% of their allowance. A $10.00 per every 50 GB fee will be assessed if you exceed the data cap more than three times.

"I have three teenage daughters who also download music, TV shows and so on. I figured someone had just gone a little overboard, and since it was close to the end of the month, I thought it wasn't anything to be worried about. The next day, however, I went online and checked my usage (Rogers has an online tool that shows daily usage), and it said that I had used 121 GB more than my allotted amount for the month. In other words, I had used more than 100 GB in less than two days."

The basic premise of this story is that, as bandwidth caps become more common, home owners with multiple Internet users will have to become "bandwidth cops" to ensure that the shared resource (GB transferred per month) doesn't get used up too quickly. It's not a role that most people will be comfortable in; technical limits of most home users will be the primary barrier. Expecting users to be able to log data transfers on a per-computer basis is simply beyond the skills of an average user. I will point out, however, that this guy's problem ended up being the old "my kid was using a file sharing service to grab TV shows and I didn't realize it". Not educating your kids on the legal/moral ramifications of content theft is up to you, the parent. No ISP is going to do that for you!

"Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber. The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced."

The battle over how you access your Internet seems like it will never end. Data caps in Canada (and the US) are quite common, meaning that services like Netflix are in a difficult position. Streaming movies adds a considerable amount of convenience since you have access to a large library (sometimes) of videos to watch. However, data transfer caps and overage fees can make such luxuries impractical.

When Netflix announced they were opening to Canadian customers, Canadian ISPs immediately announced they were lowering their caps. Now with Usage Based Billing seeming to become a reality, it seems like services that are data heavy may be few and far between. Resellers like Primus, who previously offered unlimited DSL has placed a 25GB data cap on their service. Anything over and you pay overage fees at rather impressive rates. On top of that, certain types of Internet traffic are still being shaped.

Sadly, it seems that at least for some places, it looks like there is plenty of potential for your Internet costs to go up, or be forced to limit your activity as companies seek to squeeze even higher profits backed by regulatory authorities.