trasharmdsister12 said:
Is there a bandwidth cap on your service? If not that's actually pretty cheap. To get a similar speed from one of the major ISP's in Canada you're paying ~$60 and it'll have a band cap of around 100-125 GB. That may seem like a lot, but for someone like me who wants to use Netflix to stream a handful of HD movies, and download my 20 GB games from Steam every month... It's next to nothing. And add in the fact that there are 5 other moderate to heavy internet users in my house... In Canada we have a "regulation agency" called the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission) that is supposed to regulate TV, Internet, and wireless channels and make it easy for Canadian owned businesses to operate successfully in these places. Much of the agency consists of former Bell and Rogers (two largest telecommunications , ISP, and TV providers) employees, so essentially the decisions they make are greatly in favour of the companies rather than the consumers. Just today the Canadian government had to step in and overrule a decision the CRTC made about "charge by the GB" internet usage, where ISP's would charge a base rate with a low bandwidth cap, and charge something like $2/GB if you went over. The rule mainly applied to ISP's who piggy back on the big 2's lines but implementing it would be a counter to what they're supposed to stand for; as in those smaller Canadian ISP's would have a harder time competing as they'd have to either raise prices a fair amount or greatly reduce band caps. Someone actually did a study with their new price structure and came to the conclusion that it would be cheaper for someone to buy a 256 GB SSD, store data on it, and mail it to some location than it would be to send that data through the internet. Also, when confronted about the highest telecommunications rates in the world they say that the country is so large with a low population density so they need to spend more on laying down cables than they get in return from customers... But more than 80% of the population lives within a few hours of the Canadian/US border so that argument is moot as well. I could go on but it really is no use until the government just altogether scraps the CRTC and puts a new regulation board in its place with untied individuals running it. Alright.. that's enough venting. Anyone who reads my rant gets a cookie! Oh wait..
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Nice post.. I am pretty curious what goes on in the rest of the world dealing with internet usage/pricing. Bandwidth caps sound terrible especially for me since I use Netflix / internet gaming. I suppose the picture isn't too bright in a lot of other countries as well. Bandwidth caps should be illegal especially since more and more people are streaming movies, etc.. Anyways, thanks for letting me know the situation in Canada.
