Bell gets Cheaper and More Expensive

[Hooch Tan]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='https://secure.dslreports.com/shownews/Bell-Lowers-Caps-117669' target='_blank'>https://secure.dslreports.com/shown...ers-Caps-117669</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"Users in our Bell Canada forums note that the Canadian incumbent telco has lowered the monthly rate of several of their tiers, but they've countered that by lowering customer usage caps as well. A look at the Bell website reveals that the company lowered usage limits on all their tiers, in addition to raising the overage cap penalty limit (at $1 per gigabyte) an additional $20, to $80 per month in maxiumum usage penalties."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1325868716.usr20447.gif" style="border: 0px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>Bell Canada recently made the news that it would no longer apply throttling to its customers later this year.&nbsp; Well, the other shoe has dropped and it seems that with this change comes some pricing changes.&nbsp; The ISP has dropped prices, but also lowered limits on its packages.&nbsp; Go over your data cap and get slapped with a fine.&nbsp; I cannot say this is not wholly unexpected.&nbsp; I would think this is a rather transparent attempt to draw more money from its customers as the Internet replaces other services.&nbsp; The part that makes me wonder is while connection speeds are going up, it is suspicious that the data limits are not increasing appropriately, and are even shrinking.&nbsp; Personally, I would rather have a larger data cap with the same speed, than some of the faster speeds offered.&nbsp; What about you?</p>

[Sven Johannsen]

I do wonder sometimes if people understand the relationship between higher speeds and data caps/usage. I do recall when a 100Mb wired LAN was hot ****, but now for some reason we demand such things on our mobile devices.

Hope people realize that is 100 million (100x10e6) bits per second. My AT&T data allotment is 2Giga (2x10e12) bits per month. Technically I could burn through my 2x10e12 bits in 2x10x4 secs. That. 20,000 secs, or about 333 minutes, or 5.5 hours/month.

Thats of course assuming that every bit you get is useful, which it isn't..lots of overhead. There is compression that helps though. Thing is though, you can burn through that data pretty quickly at higher speed, without a whole lot to show for it. Do I really need HD video on my 3.5 inch screen? Is my screen HD? Can my eyes tell?

[Jason Dunn]

Do I really need HD video on my 3.5 inch screen? Is my screen HD? Can my eyes tell?

No, probably not. But on a 7-10 inch tablet, or a 14 inch laptop, or a 55 inch TV? Yes, absolutely.

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Umm, but the plans in question are not phone plans. The caps are awfully small!