Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

We've talked a great deal about the unfolding data usage caps from wired ISPs over the past year here on Digital Home Thoughts, so I thought I might be interesting to share my data usage as measured by my ISP here in Western Canada, Shaw Communications. Here's my usage from December 2010 through until July 2011:

I'd guess that an average person would consume far less bandwidth, but also be the reverse of my pattern; they'd have more download usage and less upload usage. Why do I use up so much upstream bandwidth? No, it's not torrents - I've been slowly but surely adding data via Crashplan for my off-site backup (I'm up to 620 GB or so now) and last week I uploaded my 100 GB music collection to Amazon's Cloud Drive service. Now that I've uploaded pretty much all my data to Crashplan, and all my music is in the cloud, I should be using less upstream data.

What does your data usage look like? Are you bumping up against your cap (if you have one), or are you comfortably within it?

"In Calgary last week, without any fanfare, Shaw Cable launched the Shaw Gateway made by Arris which offers Shaw digital cable customers a Whole Home High Definition Personal Video Recording (HD PVR) solution. At the heart of the system is the Gateway, a digital set top box type device which connects to the cable coming into your home and acts as a server or central hub to the rest of the system. Inside the Gateway is all the processing power, hardware necessary to deliver and store high definition video signals plus a phone terminal for digital phone service, a DOCSIS 3 modem for internet service and a battery backup. Inside the Gateway is 500GB of storage and Shaw's says you'll be able to add external hard drives to the system for an additional six terabytes of storage."

If you live in Western Canada, I can confidently say you've probably seen the Telus Optik TV commercials. Telus has made significant inroads with IPTV over the past couple of years, and their new Optik TV system is based on Microsoft's MediaRoom platform. Shaw Communications has had basically the same PVR platform for almost a decade now - the user interface and functionality on the Motorola PVR I have now (I'm a Shaw customer) is virtually unchanged from the very first one they launched so very long ago. Quite frankly, that has made me rather grumpy as a customer - I've watched, somewhat enviously, as Telus has promoted Optik TV features I've love to have. Read more...