Out of curiosity, I called Shaw to ask about this little bandwidth meter. What follows is what this particular agent told me, so right or wrong, take it with a grain of salt because you might get a different answer when you call in:
- The bandwidth meter cannot be manually/voluntarily activated. I asked a couple of times, and he said not to worry about my bandwidth and if I'm over they'll tell me. (I'd rather be able to see it myself, but I'm not going to beat a dead horse).
- It will show up once you go over your cap in a given billing cycle.
- You will not be charged for overages until you have exceeded your cap for your third consecutive month. I asked for clarification by using the example of going over for two months in a row, then under, over for two more, then under again, and he said that your tally is reset as soon as you have a month that you're under the cap.
And he was able to give me the low-fi bandwidth meter by having him read off what my usage was for the past few months. I did tell him that it would be easier if I could just view it myself... I was using around 40 gigs in August-September, spiked to 60 between mid-September and mid-October (probably me screwing around with Netflix because it was new). Now I seem to be on pace for about 50-60 or so gigs a month.
I'm not a heavy Netflix user by any means, and I have a 100GB cap that I'll be hard pressed to exceed. But I do predict that there will be a lot of noise from those on the high speed tier in approximately 3 months.
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