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Originally Posted by Azure
True.
But is there a problem with a 150GB minimum bandwidth limit? That would cover the vast majority of the population. Plans with higher limits can also be available and priced accordingly.
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Sure, if it were me that's what I'd do. That's a matter of an ISP choosing the plan that strikes the balance between profits and ability to deliver and retaining customers and competition and all that that they feel is correct. I have no problem with that, nothing with this ability to charge an overage says that Telus can't set their limit to 150GB and siphon off the heavy users from Shaw.
On the other hand, look at the performance stats from Netflix for US ISPs vs. Canadian ISPs. You can't convince me that Canadian ISPs are using up more of their shareholders' money per customer to provide better performance vs. US customers out of the goodness of their hearts.
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Originally Posted by Azure
I agree with paying for what you use, but its 2011. There is no reason to lower the bandwidth cap outside of this being nothing other than a cash grab.
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Maybe, without knowing all the details it's impossible to say for sure. But that's irrelevant to the question of if they should be ALLOWED to do it. If a company wants to price themselves out of the market, they can. Or if they want to overpromise and fail because they can't deliver, they could do that too.
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Originally Posted by Azure
Netflix confirmed that it only costs pennies to deliver 1GB of bandwidth to any wired user. And that will only get cheaper as the backbone is built out with faster and faster speeds.
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I must have missed that, where did Netflix say that?
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Originally Posted by Azure
Again, I agree with paying for the bandwidth you use, but Shaw is not helping themselves with lowering the caps, and making it that magically people who once upon a time used 50GB per month, now use 200GB per month according to their meter.
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I agree, but how they run their business is their business.
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Originally Posted by Azure
From the link a few posts back.
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This staffer described the extra charge of $2 to $5 per gigabyte for overages as “obscene.”
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Every single non-residential bandwidth plan I've ever been involved with has had "obscene" overage charges, I remember having to pay $500 for one month, where I'd have paid 1/5th that if I'd planned ahead.
What's the charge per minute if you go over your voice plan? Overage fees being very expensive is nothing new, companies have used that to "encourage" users to pre-purchase buckets ahead of time since I can remember.
If you plan ahead, you can reduce the amount from $1 or $2 / GB to 20 cents a GB, and as I've pointed out Amazon is 15 cents a GB.
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Originally Posted by Azure
The hilarious thing here is that Shaw is mooching off a fiber network that the taxpayers paid for. Not only with the SuperNet, but with the original fiber laid out while the companies were still public. Now they want to charge us MORE for using the internet we paid for.
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There is a point to be made here potentially. Ignoring SuperNet for now, are there more details about this original fiber laid out? What's stopping another company from getting "lower level" access to this fiber? What was the kind of network they had then, and what is it now? What "percentage" of the current capacity is a result of that initial investment?
And that's a matter for the CRTC and government, not Shaw. If someone gives me a car, and I sell that car to make money, I'm going to sell it for as much as I can, regardless of who gave it to me.