Internet bandwidth cap…
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…
@alex
Alex,
my plan is AUD69.99 a month.
My BD player is an Allure (just a rebrand of a momitsu reference design). Down here there are sold under various brand names, Allure, Soniq, Kogan, Sherwood for example.
You could try and find a momitsu 899 (which is the original) and then you can set the dvd to be region 0 (all regions) and you switch the Bluray region as required from the remote.
Thanks for your comment Paul. It’s interesting to know how things are in other places. And you’re right, pitiful is a good term. I’ve just checked the prices and my plan is actually on a 80GB cap now (although it seems that my 95GB allowance is grandfathered…) with a slightly faster download speed… of 15 Mbps and still 1 Mbps upload max… All this for $60 CAD. They also have a plan at 25 Mbps DL and 125 GB cap for $70 CAD and one at 50 Mbps DL, 2 Mbps UL and 175 GB cap for $100 CAD!! They call it “ultimate”, how ironical is that?
Did I also mention that all peer to peer traffic (including encrypted traffic) is shaped and reduces your upload traffic to a crawl, without any notification to the end user?
BTW, what brand is your BluRay player?
Alex,
95G cap is pitiful, and I thought we had it rough here in Aus.
I’m on a 200G+200G cap (ADSL2+), that is 200G peak time and 200G off peak with uploads not counting towards quota, no excess fees for going over quota (shaped to 256kbps, individual shaping, so if exceed in off peak period, only the off peak is shaped), as well as a big range of item in the “freezone” which aren’t included in the cap (things like itunes music shop, xbox live, steam servers, radio streaming, tv catchup sites).
And this isn’t even the top plan (they have a 500G+500G plan).
The biggest surprise is that when my isp (iinet) introduced these plans, the price actually went down by a 1/3 for over double the quota.
Due to the crappy TV stations here, we often have massive delays in the tv shows airing, so I now watch most of the TV shows from alternative sources and still don’t come anywhere near my quota for the month.
I was the same for BluRay, however the biggest gripe I had wasn’t with the DRM to stop coying, but the DRM region coding. However it turns out that you can now buy players where you have the ability to switch regions using the remote and the best part is that the players that allow this are the cheap brands. So I have a AUD99 player that allows me to play dvd’s from any region as well as BluRay discs from any region.