Living With UBB

Now Usage Based Billing (UBB) of wholesale ISPs is a reality, how would this affect me? TekSavvy's usage report stop working in June (hope they fix that soon), but in March, April, and May I used about 66GB, 65GB and 59GB respectively. That would have resulted in a extra charge of $6.75 and $5.63 in March and April on top of my normal bill of $34.95 ($29.95 + $4 for static IP). This just shows that 60GB isn't that much once you start using the Internet as a TV source. A lot of people are going to be surprised by these extra charges because they stream video without really understanding how much data they transferring.

Now that the CRTC has rubber stamped UBB it is here to stay, and will probably get worse as Bell becomes emboldened by getting everything it wants. And there is little we can do about it as the CRTC seems to blithely ignore all protests. It rankles that Canada went from a world leader in broadband to worse than some Third Countries in the space of a decade. Back then the CRTC had much better foresight.