pkphilip

This UBB is more serious than many have thought. Shaw and Telus tell you that the cap will not affect most people but they are wrong. Yes, they don't affect those who only use the web for surfing/email. This is not 1990 on dial-up! We have a whole lot more on the internet.

I've done some monitoring in the past few days and these are the usage (appox):

- Day 1: Browse the web, facebook, email, about 5 youtube video clips = 300MB down, 10MB up.
- Day 2: Download a few Engligh and Chinese TV @ 200MB a pop = 2GB
- Day 3: Streaming and watching a few movies from Netflix on iPhone = 500-600MB
- Day 4: Streaming and watching 1 Netflix movie in HD = 3GB/hour

There, you get a very good idea on how much 1 device will use on your internet connection. It's so easy to rack up 10GB in a couple day. If you have a few computers, smartphones - your current 60GB limit Shaw just simply won't do it.

Bandwidth is cheap, and the costs of deploying newer equipements are not an excuse to increase price as the newer equipements simply last longer and run faster.

Since the UBB is set out by CRTC, all ISP will have to follow. My discounts from Shaw ends in May and I may look elsewhere for internet access if nothing could be done in the next few months to address this.

Time to say goodbye to AppleTV, Netflix, and all other streaming online contents and all internet telephony (skype, iTalkBB.. etc) and stick with your old cable company and enjoy thier crappy and over-priced offering.

Philip

pkphilip

Usually online petition doesn't do anything, but this time around it actually does something. The poll is now 190K and going.

Philip

pkphilip

Harper: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/n ... ute/article1890567/

I actually spent tonight going over many documents and the problems of this UBB is actually quite complicated. It started off when Bell wants to impose a fixed price (retail - 15%) to smaller ISP who wholesale Bell's service as their own. Smaller ISPs were popular because they have higher-caps and better service. The CRTC ruling basically will increase the operating costs to the smaller ISPs. This is obviously anti-competitive. In order to keep the businss profitable, caps must be lowered and charged for any overage.

The average operating cost per GB is estimate about $0.01 to 0.1, so if Shaw is charging $2/GB extra, you can do the math.

I think one way around this is to have a flex-time usage, where you don't get caps during off-peak. That way, I get to choose when I want to do my download.

Philip

pkphilip

What is economy of scale? I thought it is that more is less... In this case here, we pay more $$$ but we get less (particular in Ont where they get a 25GB cap with smaller ISPs).

According to the latest study by Cisco, a "Smart and Connected" household consume about 500GB a month:



Let's go through the chart and see how Canada is stacked up against other countries:
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/prod_101710.html

Philip