djphonics

iTrader: (1)

If you have to remember families. I live with my parents, and 2 siblings right now. Between the kids we are 15, 17, and 21. We hit 256 gb a couple months ago. Both me and my brother play ps3, and everyone streams movies. Why rent when I can stay at home and just watch it off my computer. After that month we did 'secure' our network and stopped watching movies as frequently, but I don't think it's difficult for the average 'generation x/y' person to hit a larger number.

Neo: If you leave your plan because you decided it was a good idea to do so, then you suffer your consequences. If whatever company tells you that this new service will not affect existing rates, download speeds or anything else, and it in fact does, then that company falsely represented themselves, and have to correct their errors.

Although, as I said before, he will not get his old plan back

distr0

iTrader: (1)

i've bought single games on steam that were 30+ gigs

several torrents of seasons of a show that were 100+... i went on a stargate binge, sg1, atlantis and universe... pretty sure that batch alone was 300+ gigs (plus seeding to a 1.5 ratio, puts that at 750 gigs )

that's 2 and a half years worth of bell's idea of 'acceptable use' to watch one show

nik

I haven't posted in a while but this is pretty ridiculous. Nobody should be asking the question "how do you use XXgb in a month? you must be pirating content!" Thats directed to you Aaron Cake.

Transfer caps DO NOT serve the stated purpose of trying to balance internet use. Providers end up having to build enough bandwidth for peak hours operation. When everyone is in bed at 4 am, what does it possibly cost to be utilizing all that bandwidth?

Also, transfer caps are the WRONG WAY to combat piracy, for those who assume heavy users are stealing content. Maybe we just download a LOT of HD ****!

Bell CEO has gone on record to their shareholders stating increased profits due to metering charges. Profit is not the purpose of these charges.

Btw in Sudbury we have 30Mbps/2Mbps with NO CAP. Cost is 110$/month, includes phone line and digital cable. Eastlink is the provider (I am a fan of them).

85rotarypower

FYI Online gaming is not a prime user of bandwidth. Contrary to popular belief, you don't even need a screaming fast connection to play online game seamlessly, you need a fast ping rate. You can have the fastest download/upload speed in the world, with the worst ping rate and games would play horribly. Where I am located, I have a maximum of 1.5Mbps download and 1Mbps upload rate with a 15gb cap for $55 a month. Fastest I can get is 3Mbps download 1.5 upload with a 30gb cap I think for a whopping $85 a month. There are no cables, no DSL, no optics where I am located. Its purely wireless or satellite. I've done plenty of youtube streaming, some unmentionable torrents, and plenty of online gaming on this connection and NEVER gone over 15gb. I do wish the speed was a little faster at times, mostly the ping times, as online gaming is a little bit sketchy at times, but overall I am satisfied for what I pay.

Just some food for thought. I'm only a single user in my house with a usage time between 5pm and 11pm weekdays and all day saturday/sunday. There are times when I thought I might go over, such as when I tried netflix for a short while and hated it (horrible quality IMO, not worth the money) or when I was playing COD on my PS3 hardcore 5 hours every night for 3 months straight (no, I had no life at the time, it was winter), but never once have I gone over the 15Gb limit.

Double_J

iTrader: (28)

I'd consider moving if I had a connection that slow.

But your right. For the most part if you purchased a game title in a store other than some crazy steam update gaming is all ping related and has very little to do with having a large pipe or monthly cap.

Aaron Cake

iTrader: (1)

It seems a lot more people are actually streaming than I thought. Certainly, if 2 people a day are streaming for a few hours, then I can see exceeding 60-100GB per month. I'm actually quite surprised how much streaming is happening.

Are you guys using set top boxes or viewing it on computers?

Now, I still maintain (from considerable experience) that most people are not streaming. Those talking about bandwidth use on an online forum are by nature higher bandwidth users and more savvy than 90% of people who get warned they are over their bandwidth and then call me to ask "What is bandwidth?".


Please reread my original post, because I was not accusing anyone of pirating, I was asking if they were. There is a significant difference between the two statements. Now, the reason I ask is because I've been in the industry for 16 years, and that's since the time when most people were still on dial-up and a cable/DSL installation was something a provider billed you for instead of just eating the cost of. In most cases, when a customer calls me and tells me that their home network (feels weird still to say "home network") is generating warnings from their ISP, it turns out to be the kid(s) stealing content. Or the actual customer not knowing that BitTorrent'ing movies is illegal. Remember the paid version of Limewire? It was incredible that almost everyone I spoke to was unaware that they were just paying for the program and not the downloads.

Providers do not build enough bandwidth in for peak periods. They build for average use.

Transfer caps are a way of discouraging heavy users, and allowing the provider to sell expensive content instead of cheap bits.

But here's the thing: heavy users should be paying more for their service. I certainly do. And everyone pays more for their service because of heavy users.

CS13B

iTrader: (11)

I stream movies instead of downloading them because I don't like 40-50 movies taking up all my memory on a limited, school-provided laptop. I just bought an external HD though so I may just start keeping everything I don't use on a daily basis on there.
And for viewing the movies I have one of those 15-pin PC cords hooked up to my TV that I can watch it on... or just on the laptop itself.

Double_J

iTrader: (28)

I have a few pc's. One for me, one for my kids (they surf youtube and use almost a gb a day!), and I download movies. Those movies go to my pc that's connected to my plasma and home theatre.

I will only download HD quality so the file size is a bit large. I normally aim for 720p files so they can range from 1-6gb.

p4nc7

iTrader: (1)

Limit of like 20GB I believe, for whatever reason my mom (live with my parents) won't upgrade the plan although when my sister is home the overage charges max every time.

Dad streams a lot of youtube videos, I partake in online gaming quite a bit, and my mom surfs kijiji. That alone averages around 25GB a month which (IMO) isn't outrageous, but somehow when my sister is home it jumps up to around 40 or so.

Wonder if teksavvy is avail. in Brampton.

nik

Sorry to be so harsh Aaron, it just bugs me when people in the industry who know what they are talking about start quoting the nonsensical arguments the telecoms are using.

Either way, 4 am traffic is going to be below what they have built for "average use" so what does it possibly cost to open things up during certain hours.

Agreed 100% - inherent conflict of interest.

This concept is only valid if the charge models used reflect fair prices for increased data volumes. Most current offerings do not.

Furthermore, we all know that the cost in telecommunications is for bandwidth and not for data transferred. Once the pipe is built, using it is very cheap. It doesn't matter whether it's saturated with traffic or at 1% utilization. There is no doubt that increased internet use requires building more infrastructure, but subscriber rates should reflect FAIR pricing for these increased services.

IMO it's the CRTC's job to regulate this aspect of the industry, and determine what is fair. It's pretty clear that the CRTC, with it's recent rulings, is not serving this function.

85rotarypower

I think one thing that most people are missing when dealing with bandwidth is the fact that bandwidth is based on a gigabit (Gb) scale. Files on your computer is based on gigabytes (GB, notice the upper case of the B). 1Gb is smaller than 1GB. To be exact, 8 bits is 1 byte. It gets a little confusing from there in the relationship between the two and I don't fully understand it, but I'm sure Aaron Cake can explain this further. This kind of information can help shed light on the actual usage in terms most people can understand.

A basic (and likely out of scale) example of this is a 2GB (gigabytes) downloaded movie. While the movie only showed 2GB space usage on your computer, it actually took say 6Gb (gigabits) of bandwidth to download. This is my understanding of the system. Hopefully this will help explain the extremely high usage the some people are confused about.

Double J, I mean no offence in saying this, but I wouldn't dream of moving just because my internet connection is "slow". When I was a teen living with my parents, we only had a 2Gbps connection with no cap and it was plenty fast enough for 2 teens that spent most of the day on youtube and other sites, with my dad downloading things as well. Youtube videos loaded fast enough to keep up with play rate all the time. Seems people these days are just too impatient to deal with a slower connection that doesn't load the video in a matter of seconds... My current connection is fast enough to do everything I want to with no way of improving my experience. Considered satellite as it offers decent bandwidth, but ping time tends to be horrendous on that system. Wireless is my only option, and I'm not about to pay for more bandwidth when I don't need it.

CS13B

iTrader: (11)

^ good point I forgot about the conversion

Just as a reference point for my usage:

Duration: 18:07:30 (18 hours)

Activity (in bytes): Sent - 51 million, Received - 444 million

Aaron Cake

iTrader: (1)

I've never really paid much attention to whether the caps are listed in "Gb" or "GB". Probably both ways and you'll only get a clarification if they mean bits or bytes by calling and talking to tier 3 support.

JSmith0101

iTrader: (6)

Netflix in HD will do that. Right to your PS3, XBox 360, PC, Wii, iPod, set top box, TV, etc..

CS13B

iTrader: (11)

Which takes 3 hours.

djphonics

iTrader: (1)

^cogeco is generally pretty quick when I call in.

I stream using the lap top, but HDMI it out to the boob tube when I can.

And Netflix is only worth it when it's split among people nudge nudge. They do have plenty of HD quality stuff as well

WHO

I'm with Bell Fibe 16+.
It's 60$ a month and 90Gb per month. But I get speed up to 25Mps down and 7.5Mps UP when I'm not watching TV. Watching TV it can drop to about 12/7... depending how many HD/SD channels we're watching at once. I beleive HD channels eat up 6Mps and SD are 4Mps.

BTW, the 5$ for 40extra Gb can be combined over and over again. So you can buy 80Gb for 10$, 120 for 15, etc.

Still a rip off. And after what they did to you I would simply cancel everything. perhaps the very threat to cancel will make them give you back your old plan. They're trying really hard to get people out of the unlimited plans, but lying should never be tolerated.

I'm also with bell only because I'm an employee. Without those discounts, I'd be out of there in a heartbeat.