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Internet bandwidth cap…

September 13th, 2010 3 comments

I just made the following quick math:

I have a 95 GB bandwidth monthly cap with my current ISP (Rogers) Internet contract (which was added over the time, along with removing other services and increasing the price…).

95 GB is a lot you might say. This cap includes both uploads and downloads.

Here are 2 things I think makes it not so big:

  • If I was to use my current “10 Mbps” connection at 100% for downloading only, I would reach this limit in just over 24 hours. That’s less than 1 hour of 100% usage per day in a month. For just downloading.
  • As I ditched the cable TV, and don’t trust Blu-Ray DRM so I won’t buy a Blu-ray reader soon, I like to get content for my HD TV from either DVD or from the Internet. High Definition movies are about 1 GB per hour. Downloading only 4 movies, 2 hours each would already use 10% of my bandwidth. Add a weekly TV series (4 episodes) for another 8Gb… and you get the picture on how we can soon reach the cap in less than a month, all perfectly legally.

This is surely something Rogers would like to prevent me from doing as they would rather have me pay for their cable or “pay-per-view” offering instead of using internet, which of course I’m not going to do

All that to say that my ISP (Rogers) is selling me a so called monthly service that I need to carefully manage if I want to be able to see the content I chose, and use it during the entire course of a month.

This is not even considering the fact that the ISP wouldn’t be able to provide this service if all their clients in a given area would start using their Internet bandwidth at 100% capacity…

Here is for instance our family usage history for the past 6 months… and I should add here that we almost never turn torrents on 🙂

This is something we can manage now, but I just wait for two things before I switch to another provider:

  • Competition readiness (for instance, Teksavvy already provides DSL in my area, but is expecting to also provide cable in a near future)
  • Receiving my first bill from Rogers with charges for additional bandwidth…

After writing this rant, I checked the current plans on Rogers, and my plan has changed to 15 Mbps download speed and 80 GB cap… so make the 24 hours 21 now… It seems that my cap to 95 GB was grandfathered, but I don’t see the speed bump either…

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