Canadian online gamers, Steam and X-Box live users are going to get screwed...

[purplecactusplant]

Recently a body of the Canadian government approved "Usage Based Billing" - basically defining online data as something it's not - a finite resource. This was ruling was done in favour of Canadian internet service providers who now get to put a cap on the amount of data consumers can use each month - you go over that cap, you get charged somewhere around $2/GB.

(This guy explains it beautifully - http://openmedia.ca/blog/open-letter-concerning-not-so-open-internet)

Anyways, this really pisses me off - I regularly download games from Steam, as do my boyfriend and my roommates, and we tend to play a lof of League of Legends or L4D, (usually while running Skype in the background). This is going to add up to one gigantic bill.(Not to mention all the implications of Canadian's rights to access information being limited.)

I'm asking other Canadians - how will this affect your time gaming? Will you pull back on online gaming/downloading or are you willing to pay?
Also, I'm wondering how much data is used up when you're playing games online (say, League of Legends or Darkfall) - no one I've asked seems to know.

By the way, there is a petition to stop this:
http://openmedia.ca/meter

 

[migo]

Fortunately I'm with Novus, which has a 125GBx2 (up and down, so they explicitly support torrenting and running a personal web server) bandwidth limit, and I've only hit it once (in 1 day no less!) I told them I was running torrents, they re-set it for me. They run their own wires to the buildings, and aren't dependent on any of the incumbents.

I've also looked up some alternative ISPs, and it seems Allstream serves business users, and has no cap DSL at 7Mb/s, but home users could get it as well. Might be a bit expensive ($35 for the first 6 months, $70 for the rest unless you want to sign a contract), but at least you can use as much as you want.

Telus also has a tendency of ignoring bandwidth limitations if you bundle with TV service. Again, somewhat expensive, but it isn't the end of the world. Certainly Bell and Rogers will be trying to screw users as well as resellers, but there are viable alternatives despite the ruling.

 

[Torrasque]

Your link doesn't work =/
This sounds really fucking stupid though.
I'll have to change my internets service.

 

[Oxford The Cat]

Right now Shaw is the only company in Canada which does this. Since the other companies haven't hopped on board, I don't think they will anytime soon.

Every major company does it.

Bell, Rogers, Cogeco all have caps in place for high speed internet, with tiered plans varying the price / bandwidth.

The old days of unlimited bandwidth are over.

 

[Wyes]

Wait, you guys didn't already have this? I thought it was just the norm... (Australian here)

 

[Oxford The Cat]

Your link doesn't work =/
This sounds really fucking stupid though.
I'll have to change my internets service.

That's just what the uproar is about, you really can't change to anyone.

Most small and local based ISPs exist by 'buying' bandwidth from large providers such as Bell.
The continued rulings in favour of companies like Bell enable them to charge & cap these small ISPs for traffic, effectively making them able to price their potential competition out of the market.

In 2007 Bell was the first Canadian company to start imposing bandwidth caps on it's individual clients. Clients that didn't like it had the option of switching to companies that didn't cap.
Now all the major companies cap, and the most recent decision reaffirms their ability to cap and charge the traffic of smaller ISPs that purchase bandwidth blocks from them (though the CRTC has mandated a discounted rate for small / local ISPs).

Internet monopolization.

 

[Oxford The Cat]

I was on the phone with Telus last week about this subject. They informed me that Shaw is the only company which does this and assured me I wouldn't be billed if I went over the set limit on my account.

Cogeco has billed me for over bandwidth use, as has Telus.
I assure you, they will charge you if you exceed your mobile data plan, despite what the call-center said.
They certainly had no qualms about charging me.

 

[Oxford The Cat]

What's this about mobile? I'm using a landline.

Ah okay, I assumed you meant your 3G data.
Not familiar with their land-line policies.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

This has been a standard way of billing internet usage for years all over the world. $2/GB is nothing. One provider here in Australia used to charge cents per MB. I really don't know what you're complaining about. If you have a large enough cap, this shouldn't be a problem.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

Eaten post.

 

[BoogieManFL]

Wow, that's ultra lame. Mind bogglingly lame. I hope that BS gets dropped. I'm hitting that petition right now and I don't live in Canada.

No one should have restricted access to the internet, it's one of my most amazing things created by humanity. Additionally, it's not designed to be to work with a fee for bandwidth usage. If this passes in Canada then every time you get an unwanted ad or popup you deserve money off your bill. What if someone aggressively pings your connection or tries to execute a Denial of Service Attack. It'll cost the victims money! It'd be like allowing to have your neighbors use your water hose legally at will and yet you still have to pay for it. Idiocy.


Bottom line, it's not designed with that concept in mind. It'd be like big oil companies being able to poke small holes in your gas tank legally so you have to buy gas more often.

 

[antofdeath]

Maybe I missed the point of what is being said but I use shaw and generally we do what was it 800gb/month or more across our household, they actually put us on two separate ip addresses because of the bulk of random stuff we download.

Shaw did something very interesting though, instead of increasing our bill to ridiculous levels they basically automatically signed us up for their "High bandwidth" things for the simple reason that well it was cheaper then paying the over use fees. I don't know if this will remain the same but from what I could tell shaw has been doing something similar to this for years.

I might actually have a problem with it too if shaw didn't happen to have the best service of all ISPs we have used before, which includes less complete frag ups (though we have been having abunch of anomalous ping is uses which are remedied with significantly faster and more stable use after, upgrades?) and they also supply us with TV (which we barely use because of internet) and telephone (also barely used because of internet) the short of it though is that sure shaw might be the first on this possibly concerning thing, they seem to be behaving 8x better then telus does in the first place.

 

[lapan]

Over here in Austria we luckily still have flat rates without payments for going over limits. I'm not even sure what my limit would be, i have yet to go over any kind of limit.