redgreen21

meighty

Bendbroadband has released a new tier.
For the low low price of $74.95 you now have a 100gb cap. You only get the 8mbps service, not the 16mbps. However, if you want to pay for business service which is $149.95 for 8mbps you can have uncapped downloads and uploads. Keep in mind, this isn't just downloads. It's uploads to. TOTAL BANDWIDTH. Send 5gb and receive 5gb you are at your limit. I've been a long time user of this service and I'm sad I'm going to have to say good bye. Wait...no I'm not.

meighty

I came to Melbourne and my first plan was AU$69.95/mth for ONLY FRICKIN' 12GB at 1500kbps. I upgraded to 25GB for AU$79.95/mth at the same speed. This is NORMAL here. There's even a 500MB plan and they charge FRICKIN' 39.95/mth for that.

$55 for 50GB seems like so much compared to what I'm using now. And $1.50 per GB extra usage?! THAT'S CHEAP COMPARED TO AUSTRALIA. We pay 15cents per MEGABYTE over the 25gb limit. That's $150 per GIGABYTE overused.

Hell I have to check my USAGE if I use YouTube too much.

ragflan

Mr_LaZy

Justin

FixBBB

Justin

FixBBB

FiOS will be no different IMHO ... it is just a matter of time. FiOS uses a shared bus just like cable.

Sooner or later the illicit P2P minority will drive this up where action is also required.

It's about time we understand that we are subsidizing illegal multimedia content.

Everyone wants something for nothing. Get ahold of P2P or be willing to pay $$$ for the right of the minority to pull ripped multimedia content.

We decided to put up with UCE ... well now it is 90% of our SMTP content.

BendUser

Anyway, here's another link as penance, to make up for my poor spelling skilz:
[www.steam-training.com]

SalParadise

Ike_Skelton

SalParadise

If they take these half-baked schemes to my area, I'm switching to FiOS. Verizon may have more than two problems, but at least when they say "unlimited", they mean "unlimited".

HeartBurnKid, creepy morbid freak

Ike_Skelton

Piss off enough comsumers - you better watch out!

uberfu

Ya know_

[sarcasm]
The first few years the car was around there wasn't a speed limit either and then one day.... that "freedom" was taken away_ This is no different_ [/sarcasm]

uberfu

who pays for this? does the 99% of residential users fund the 1% drinking dom perigon while we all drink water. i don't this so.

- according to the press, 5% of these folks use half the capacity.
- this type of usage is most likely generated by illegal sharing of big multimedia content.

the threat to the future of the Internet are the spammers and kings of illegal multimedia content. if the p2p folks would add some type of watermarking, conditional access, or other type of mark for legitimate traffic we'd have no issues.

but then again, has an addition to smtp protocol for identity happened to allow for easy filtering of spam ... I think not and now 90% of smtp traffic is crap.

so ... now I'll be we start hitting 90% of bandwidth for illegal content.

who foots the bill here? if there becomes no model for residential internet then it will go away.

BendUser

avconsumer

ADSL is crap. Speed decreases with distance. I am about 2,5 Km distant from ISP. That's considered far enough. So, the "amazing" 24 Mbps speed arrives at 5,5 to 6 Mbps at my home. Beside that, ever ISP imposes a contention rate on the central, what means that you have to share your speed with several other people in your area. That reduces in 20% the speed that is already Low. So, 6 Mbps is reduced in 20% and falls to 4,8 Mbps.

Beyond all that, all ISP measure the speed between your home and their central. The point is that their jammed networks will never deliver the same speed to the outside world, i.e., the web. So, my connection that after all reductions was in 4.8 Mbps is reduced even more. In a nutshell: I NEVER HAD SPEEDS BEYOND 3 Mbps... and remember, I have a 24 Mbps link!

You can think my is a particular problem and will not happen to you. If you think so, go ahead and order this 16 Mbps connection. I advice you that you will never have this speed, even in your wildest dreams.... unless you live inside the telephonic central.

octopussy

for an idea of it. look up eircom.net broadband.

williethewisp

At your discretion.

It puts the power in the hands of the user, rather than the ISP. It's far, far preferable to paying for an 'unlimited' service, that has limits you can't see disguised as 'fair usage'.

toastyghost

Personally, none of these plans really fit my needs. I have multiple subscriptions to downloadable (legal) software, and also pick up quite a few TV series some of which are in HD (well 1.5gb per episode). With all of this, I can easily top 1TB per week. It is my opinion that, HD video and internet software distribution will become more commonplace in the future.

tanukineri

Angus

Especially considering all those fancy back bones of our intertubes were paid by the US taxpayer. And all further upgrades to the system are paid for by tax breaks (on the back of the US taxpayer) to said telcos and all fees charged to us by telcos and cable since the mid-70's...

It's unfortunate that all those fun things that the broadband suppliers say we can do with their connections cost more when we actually use them.

radio1

It used to be unlimited, but in October they changed it to 100gb up/down combined "to better service us" Honestly it hasn't been a problem, I download dozens of mov... err "linux distros" a month and haven't gone over once.

The strange thing is there's an even faster level of service for more $$ but the combined cap is only 20gb/mo

I generally just throttle my torrent uploads a bit, no problems yet.

Confuzius

backbroken

ISP pricing models were traditionally based on the stat-mux effect where you assumed that most of the people were quiet were most of the time. This meant that the ISP could offer (say) an 8mps service for a *tiny* fraction of the real *cost* of provisioning 8mps 24x7. The customer benefited from cheap broadband, the provider sold more connections and everyone was happy.

However usage patterns on the Internet are changing. More and more people are running torrents 24x7, more streaming services, video chats etc all diminishing the stat mux benefit. Given Internet access provision is a lousy business to be in anyway, it's hardly surprising providers are starting to look at new pricing models. What choices have they got:

* move all the prices upwards to reflect the diminishing benefits of stat-muxing ? Problem with this is it risks pricing out the market occasional internet users, leaving you with the hard-core always-on users, so further diminishing the benefits of stat-muxing and so leading to further price rises. Vicious circle;

* Keep the existing model, but enforce "fair-use" provision so that you can either cap or kick-off particularly abusive users of the network. This can work if done with some sensitivity, but usually isn't; too often it just comes across as an arbitrary and capricious act by the ISP;

* Stuff in some magic box to moderate/block traffic the ISP considers abusive. Bar the vendor of said magic boxes, we all hate this approach :-) ;

* Have a basic, low-cost cap for the entry level users, plus unlimited pay as you go above that. No fair-use restraints, no protocol filters, just pay for what you eat. Seems to me this may well be the least worst approach ...

khoadley

Sockpuppet

Slash3

skilled1

Well thats ok, we do have it pretty crap, tho for £21 (bout $40) i get a peak/off peak usage policy

peak = 20gb usage (between 4.00pm and 12.00am)
off peak = Truly Unlimited, there was a fair usage policy of 50gb, but they lifted that, so basically, they only get unhappy if you seem to be using it for commercial use. (like 500gb or summit crazy)

So i just do all my downloadng during the day!

Jakus

This will just drive us all back to dialup

emp19

Anyways, I made a site at [fixbbb.com] for anyone who wants to participate in a public protest, or just vent about how you hate consumption based billing.

I want to take a moment to thank Gizmodo for posting this article. i believe it's going to help us out a lot!

FixBBB

Sven.T.Sexgore

[utterlyboring.com]

I'm over the 50GB/month on a fairly regular basis.

orty

For srsly.

Here in the UK we're charged the equivalent of $60 a month for an 8mbps downstream with a 15gb limit. My parent's former much more expensive plan of $120 per month bought us 50gb for a similar line, but you have it a lot easier over there, that's for sure.

legacye

RIAA has nothing to do with this one.

mricyfire

sonburn

Devo-Chu

Bull. First, MOST industries would not even EXIST if not for private enterprise. Government creats nothing except burocracy. Second, when you talk about nationalising an industry, don't forget that what you really mean is STEALING ownership from the companies that own them now. And who owns those companies? "Them?" "Soulless Corporations?" NO. PEople own companies; people like you and me. I'm no fat cat, but I have a 401k, some mutuals, a small stock portfolio. I know I've got some ISP shares somewhere in all that. So you are talking about STEALING from ME! Screw you, you pinko thief! :-)

Candyman

Evermore707

There's still Primus: my parents pay $69 for local telephone + long distance + DSL that's plenty quick with no cap.

mariospants

At my previous place, I had Shaw, and it was fantastic. It's the same deal at $40 (only 5Mbps, but more reliable), but for $10 more you can get 10Mbps, 100GB/mo transfer.

Still, it's sad that Shaw's (and Canada's) best residential service is $93/mo for 25Mbps and 150GB transfer cap. I don't really care about the caps right now, but for a country that has an extremely good rate of broadband uptake, we should be getting much better prices by now.

Topcat

surf.seppo

BigViper

Does downloading and uploading count towards
my bandwidth allowance?
Yes, BOTH downloading and uploading count towards
your monthly allowance.

CAPS added for emphasis.

Is this normal? I always thought bandwidth was measured on the download side...

CatZilla

rossgl

MadLinx

MadLinx

Glamdering

ggvrsn

Kanti_V2

sgrmba

the problem is that the tech is begin outdated by demand, they can't keep up with all the new bandwidth demands so instead of actually having a new network they want to throttle the old.

Uh, yeah I hope this guy and Time Warner shrivel up and die.

rjupiter

Heavybell

Glamdering

The name of my ISP is.. TELUS! :P.

But i'm thinking of switching to Shaw Cable Internet.

It's only 42$ a month.

You get 10MBPS download speed.
1MBPS upload speed.
100GB Monthly transfer.

Kakkoister

Kevin1a

Half off all shafts!

I feel sorry for you east side Canadians lol.

Kakkoister

I'm not sure what you guys' big problem is, though. From what I read, you already have traffic-capped broadband, it's just that the ISPs don't tell you what the caps are. You may as well ask for honesty from your ISPs -- it'll at least help you focus on what you really need.

Repton

This is only 1 damn ISP.. It's not like Canada is a small town with one ISP.. It's a freaking country.

Over here on the West side... BC CANADA..

I get 3mbps down, with a 60gb upload limit and unlimited download..

If I exceed to far past my monthly upload every month... then I get a warning.. and later disconnected if I keep doing it to much.

So it's great :). And they have the best privacy policy :P.

Kakkoister

Almost all BB packages here are 40GB/month and the best that most of them can offer is 8Mb down.
And, including line rental (which I don't know how that works in the US), all but the cheapest ones are probably more expensive than the package you're quoting here.

Step666

This same argument was made by telcos about people who nailed up their phone lines in the 90's. Yet, they weren't handing out refunds to grannies either.

pashdown

Fatty

archercc

In the end, I think it's fair for them to charge higher prices for extreme users (maybe >1TB).

The Hoff

The Hoff

iiviip3

lpranal

matt buchanan

D4RK_53K70R

our T1 through them was even capped at 20GB for awhile. one month we magically used 20-30x more than we ever had in the past... got a $22000 bill or something ridiculous that month.

x23

I was actually looking to sign up with them and break off my apartments free wifi, but instead wrote them a fairly nasty email outlining why I won't e signing up with them... ever. I will wait out FIOS and continue to use my free and unlimited bandwidth.

ouphie

Here is a link to the video: [www.beet.tv]

Joseph

I believe things may get to the point where most if not all ISP's will have some kind of cap / pay-per-GB pricing scheme, people really REALLY like all-you-can-eat intrarwebs, so all it would take is one company to take advantage of that fact and undercut everyone else.

Either way, customers should NOT be footing the bill for the lack of infrastructure that causes bandwidth to be so "expensive". I fully expect this to blow up in the faces of the ISP's dumb enough to try this.

lpranal

Take out the overhead, take out the million dollar salaries, and we can drop these huge fees that keep people from being able to afford high speed internet. If the public owns the grid, then we can do what Japan is doing, and what private companies here either can't or won't do, and invest tax payer money in a state of the art communications infrastructure, and not just sit around and wait for it to be profitable.

If we own the lines, then private companies can be service providers, but without this regional monopoly bullshit, keeping competition in the market, but restricting them from jacking up the rates, capping the speed, or censoring the content.

The more people with internet connections, the cheaper that connection, and the faster that connection, the more content they'll purchase, growing our economy. It's simple demand-side economics (the kind that actually works). Or we can give up on net neutrality, and cross our fingers that the telco's won't screw us all over for some short term profits.

Kanti_V2

cygnusx8

That's actually a really good point... let's hope that cable companies follow directly behind the cell phone companies nowadays. What with Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, Tmobile all trying to compete with one another with their "unlimited plans", hopefully the same model with migrate over to ISP's.

*crosses fingers*

cloudnine

Er, I mean...

Seriously, though... this is really lame. In an age where there are operating system software updates that can be hundreds of megs, where there are music downloads, movie downloads, people running small businesses from their homes, this is really lame. 500 gigs is probably good enough for the average household, yeah, but there are plenty of homes now that are far from the "average household". BitTorrent aside, people are going to need more than 500GB. 1 TB and I'd stop my bitching :P

cloudnine

Haha, all I can think of when I see XMission is Maddox.

Gordon_Shumway

sisedi

DustyButt

[xmission.com]
[stats.xmission.com]

pashdown

PhysicsMan

Gordon_Shumway

[gizmodo.com]

Hiphopopotamus

ninjagin

I mean jesus, I just uploaded my pics from my Japan trip to my site and they were around 7GB and then I uploaded another 2GB to Facebook.

im fawked! Im constantly Folding@Home and downloading from iTunes and stuff.

FU broadband providers

illegalprelude

frigg

MagnoliaBoy

Unfortunately, local ISP monopolies give consumers very little choice, and the telecom industry isn't exactly known for welcoming honest competition from little guys...

nutbastard

I remember when data use on cells were "per KB", now most major carriers offer an "all you can eat" model.

If these new costs will get me a faster connection, then I'm willing to pay for them - short term. I'm fairly sure that, given time, they'll be forced back to the "all you can eat" model. At least until the *next* big upgrade.

Dunny0, ELE Hopeful

CruJones

I recall a day when there were no ATM fees with *any* ATM, then once ATMs caught on -- fees, fees, fees.

This is not a good sign.

webwbr

chazy567

radikaled

mth2574