201–210 of 269 posts
The norm in New Zealand is to pay for say, 20GB per month, and if you exceed that then you drop down to dial-up speed (or pay for more).
With all due respect to the Canadians here, it's not really that bad at all. Life goes on, and it actually seems to be a pretty good life too.
I'll provide one data point of how this affects Canadian internet users. I currently have no caps with TekSavvy and pay $39 a month. Starting from March 1st, I will pay $31.95/mo with a 25 GB cap. Any gigabyte over the limit will cost about 2 bucks. Now, you can buy a block at discounted prices. According to TekSavvy, based on my internet usage, I will need to buy at least a 275 GB extra block. Believe it or not, I d…
I'm with Teksavvy as well and currently pay $31.95 + tax for a 200GB cap. I'm using less than half of that, or about ~80GB/month. Under the new rules I will have to pay $40.45 + tax for 105GB cap. In the rare (for me) case that might exceed this cap I'll pay $2/GB for additional traffic.
If I cancelled Netflix I'd probably come in just under the 25GB cap. Bell has effectively doubled the price of Netflix for me.
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Picking the two extremes does not prove your point. A lot of people are pissed with ads right now. Imagine if they would have to pay for them too (even pennies).
I wasn't picking extremes, simply pointing out how little ads would effect you. Besides, doesn't Adblock work client-side? You'd still download and pay for the ads, you just wouldn't see them.
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Which absolutely does not rule out the possibility that the data cost is much smaller than the cost of maintaining the copper. Do you have the numbers?
I do not at the moment - I perhaps phrased it poorly - but the cost of the in-ground copper wire is but one part of the costs of an ISP - datacenters, call centres, exchanges + dslams, specialist staff, CEO's bonus pay, so on and so forth. To paint the cost of DSL as almost entirely maintenance of the in-ground copper is nonsense.
I'll provide one data point of how this affects Canadian internet users. I currently have no caps with TekSavvy and pay $39 a month. Starting from March 1st, I will pay $31.95/mo with a 25 GB cap. Any gigabyte over the limit will cost about 2 bucks. Now, you can buy a block at discounted prices. According to TekSavvy, based on my internet usage, I will need to buy at least a 275 GB extra block. Believe it or not, I d…
I'm in no way trying to hijack the thread, but where I live, I pay $45/month for a 4 GB cap and 2$ per extra gigabyte. Theoretically, I should get 512kbits per second. Practically, however, I'm getting an average of 300kb and a 200ms latency to US and EU servers. You want to know the cool part? I'm doing just fine. That is to say, if you take a step back and think about it, you could probably live off 25 GBs per mont…
My fiancé was between semesters at school this winter, and decided to finish watching Battlestar Galactica, among a couple dozen other movies to occupy her time through Netflix. My router's bandwidth logs show that she consumed about 35GB a day for 12 of her 15 days off. We hit somewhere under 500GB of data that month. Using TekSavvy's upcoming rates listed in this thread at $32.00 per month for 25GB with $2.00 per additional GB, we would have had a bill approaching $1,000.00. How the fuck is that justifiable?
Our current model takes in account that occasionally, users will blow through their caps with no regard for the sky, but most other months are way below the cap. My current plan, of which was negotiated over 4 years ago and has not changed since, still serves my needs perfectly. I could cut out Netflix and my VPS backups and use 4GB a month, but why should I move to a service plan that is lesser than my 4 year old contract? Did I mention my current ISP service plan was negotiated 4 years ago? ISPs have had 4 years, in my case, to upgrade their equipment to accommodate an increase in users, of which they have been pushing, because as a company, they like having an increase in subscribers. Realizing now that they are at the peak and want more money for the increased traffic is entirely out of line since they have had years of growth in their subscriber base and years of blind profit, but none of that was spent ensuring that they would have additional room to grow.
I would gladly pay a flat fee per GB of data, since theoretically it is more fair. I will not pay a flat fee that is approaching a 15 times increase profit for my ISP from what they paid for that GB. They gave me and every single other subscriber 250GB to use per month, and for the past 4 years, my habits have evolved to be aware and use 250GB of data per month. Cutting it back to 25GB and additional at $2/GB is entirely ridiculous. Moving backwards is not a solution.
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The parent sits at 38 points while being almost entirely wrong. I want endless bandwidth as well, but this is absolutely the decline of this site, with "what I want" and "the way I present the world to support my bias" crowding out "what is real" and "actual fact". Isn't that sort of tactic best left on reddit?
1. It is within the realm of technology to profitably provide unmetered bandwidth at standard rates, with minimal shaping during peak use hours. To borrow the phrase seen used on here with reference to nuclear power, bandwidth is almost "too cheap to meter." That's what is real. 2. What the ISPs and/or infrastructure owners are charging is orders of magnitude beyond covering costs. Bandwidth is getting cheaper as tec…
This is not the standards for HN. It is, if anything, the antithesis of HN.
I'll provide one data point of how this affects Canadian internet users. I currently have no caps with TekSavvy and pay $39 a month. Starting from March 1st, I will pay $31.95/mo with a 25 GB cap. Any gigabyte over the limit will cost about 2 bucks. Now, you can buy a block at discounted prices. According to TekSavvy, based on my internet usage, I will need to buy at least a 275 GB extra block. Believe it or not, I d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The situation is much more complicated than that. Smaller ISPs only piggy back on Bell's telephone lines only in the so-called last mile of the connection. The resellers have their own DSLAM equipment at the switchboards and they have to make their own peering arrangements to the rest of the internet. Bell's telephone lines have been (still are) heavily subsidized by the government, which is why the government is req…
The parent sits at 38 points while being almost entirely wrong. I want endless bandwidth as well, but this is absolutely the decline of this site, with "what I want" and "the way I present the world to support my bias" crowding out "what is real" and "actual fact". Isn't that sort of tactic best left on reddit?
Do you have any evidence that he's wrong, an argument why he's wrong, or even a different assertion of the facts?
This has actually been a fairly fact-filled, low-whine conversation, with reason-filled arguments. It's a topic (proper regulation of state-granted monopolies) that goes back hundreds of years (to American Colonial times, at least). The fact is, you need a monopoly on last mile connections because it's not feasible to let 3-4 ISPs run last-mile connections, even if it could be made profitable. To prevent the company with that monopoly from owning the whole telecommunications industry (at least in that region), governments sometimes force them to lease those lines to competitors at agreed-upon rates, so that those competitors can keep the monopoly (in this case, Bell) in check. But Canada's change has let Bell impose restrictions on those competitors' plans, so that those competitors can't offer better plans (at least in terms of cost/GB), which basically circumvents the whole reason to make Bell let competitors lease the lines.
New services such as Netflix and who knows what else is coming down the line (3D Netflix movies?) are going to use up your overpriced bandwidth faster than your ISP can evolve, they'll just charge more for the same service.
This will be like when video became popular when everyone was still on 56kbps modems, the web developed faster than the hardware meant to use it and it will stall development. Why develop when there isn't anyone using it or able to use it?
In the end people will do what they have to when they only have a limited amount of disposable income, ISPs will see people spend $50 for 10Mbps service and when the ISPs increase the monthly bill by a $1 here and a $1 there (to serve us better) consumers will get the 5Mbps service for $50.
It's not a matter of regulations, it's a matter of markets. Some companies such as Bell treat their customers like crap and just want to lock them into a long term contract. So what? There are lots of competitors who will not be doing UBB such as Telus / Shaw / Rogers. Customers on Bell just became the world's biggest internet losers. If people don't like UBB they can always switch carriers unless they were dumb enou…
You're ignorant. Everyone has to apply the UBB and no one has contracts, even Bell.
http://internet.bell.ca/index.cfm?method=content.view&co...
oh and here's an article talking about people being on 1 2 or 3 year contracts for bell internet. How could they be on contracts if no one has them?