News: Multiple Canadian ISP's will begin charging for bandwidth come 2011

[SpankIt]

Hello fellow leechers,
I recently received a phone call from my service provider (Shaw Cable) who informed me that I had gone over my monthly limits, a call that I'm sure many of you have received before. What was different about this call was that the TSR informed me that they will soon be charging for over usage. As an IT professional who has lots of friends working for ISP's this is an idea that has been thrown around for a few years now with no conclusive answer. As a result I started to do some digging to find out if this was in fact something that was coming down the pipe. This resulted in me calling an other local ISP to find out if they had similar plans. Here is the information I have gathered thus far.

Shaw: Confirmed on the phone with a Shaw TSR. Here is the pricing that I was provided.
$2/GB (no dataplan)
$0.20/GB (250GB/Month Dataplan)

NOTE: You will only be charged for what you use over and above what they advertise comes with the service.

Telus: Confirmed the system will be coming to their network in the new year. Unfortunately they had not yet come up with any pricing.

[webtoad]

A lot of ISPs in Australia already charge if you go over the data limit on your plan (while others just cap your speed and don't charge), except they charge by the MB, not GB.

[shypike]

Surprising to see that the champions of the free market
don't seem to have any meaningful competition in the Internet arena.

[nutsy]

It's not that uncommon a practice in the UK, either - nearly all ISP's will either throttle your speed down after you reach a usage CAP, or charge extra, or simply kick you off the service. Some just ask you to schedule bulk transfers to off peak times.

The sad thing is, often ISP's aren't transparent about how much bandwidth you are allowed to use before you get in trouble.