And here’s the fun part: Bell Canada owns most of the “last-mile” copper connections in Canada, so competing ISPs that use the same lines will also be metered by Bell.

To put this in perspective, let’s take a look at just how much data 25GB is…

• Netflix streaming uses about 1GB per hour. So you could watch 25 hours (10-12 movies) in a month, assuming you did nothing else.
• A 45-minute TV show or video podcast downloaded via iTunes is about 200MB in size. So, about 125 in a month.
• A 1-3 minute video from YouTube is around 5-10MB in size, depending on the quality.
• A one-hour (standard definition) stream from Hulu is about 350MB. You could cram about 70 hours of Hulu streaming into one month, again, assuming you only did that.
• Online gaming, whether a console game or an MMORPG on your PC, uses very little data. In order to get around network latency issues (to keep the game from lagging badly) games send frequent, but very small, data packets. You probably wouldn’t use more than 50-70MB per hour of gaming, though it could vary greatly depending on the game. Also, voice chat would increase the number significantly.
• Streaming Last.fm music will use 30MB per hour using a low-quality 64kbps stream, and 60MB at 128kbps. You would eat through 25GB in 375 hours.
• iTunes AAC music downloads generally range from 70MB-200MB per album. That’s about 128 albums per month.

One can’t help but wonder if Bell Canada wishes to prevent Netflix—which just recently became available outside of the United States—from being widely adopted in Canada, so more people will continue to use their cable television service.

Further Reading

• 200GB to 25GB: Canada gets first, bitter dose of metered Internet
• Tech News Today 169: Sandybridge Over Troubled Water
• What does 5GB (Gigabytes) Get Me?
• Stop The Meter Petition

EDIT: Apparently petitions work in Canada. UBB is being rescinded or overturned by popular demand.

The ISPs, phone companies and cellphone carriers have been very vocal in their opposition, and have went so far as to encourage their employees to astroturf. As a result, there has been a lot of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (or FUD) spread about the issue. Some fear that the FCC wishes to impose a version of the old Fairness Doctrine on the internet, which couldn’t be further from the truth. (The regulations would prevent something like that, since they require that any and all lawful content be accessible without discrimination.)

Essentially, these are regulations to prevent regulation or ISP tampering. They’re to make sure that the ISPs stay as what they should be: indiscriminate carriers of unopened and untampered packages.

You can read more thorough explanations of what’s going on at Wired at PC Word:

• Net Neutrality FAQ: What’s in it for You
• FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules, Now the Fight Begins

Not long after the FCC made their decision, Senator John McCain (Republican, Arizona) introduced a bill to Congress known as the Internet Freedom Act. It’s purpose is to “keep the FCC from enacting rules prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Internet content and applications.” Not only that, but it will essentially prevent the FCC from regulating anything related to the internet or cellphones. This coming from someone who has admitted to not knowing how to operate a computer.

This is an important issue, to everyone. The internet is a global thing, and allowing companies to tamper with the traffic passing through it is bad for everyone, no matter what country they’re from. It must remain neutral.

I would say that you shouldn’t believe the telcos or those who support their agenda, but I prefer not to try to make peoples’ opinions up for them. So I’ll say this: Use your head. Research the issue, find out what both sides have to say. Then make up your mind for your self. Are you for openness, or for giving the telcos free reign?

“While a smartphone user downloads a fraction (typically 1/25th) of the data consumed by a laptop user, the signaling load produced by the smartphone user is much higher and in fact one third of the laptop user on average,” wrote Airvana. “In other words, while it takes 25 smart phones to equal the data throughput from one laptop, it only takes three smart phones to equal the signaling network impact of one laptop (25/3 ≈ 8x).”

The basic idea is that a cellphone does a lot of polling, making various checks and requests as long as the device is on, and most people leave their phone on pretty much all day.

Providers of cellular internet service traditionally have charged steep rates in order to have service for your laptop, and then cap your transfer at an almost unusable level. For instance, the $60/month “DataConnect” plan from AT&T “includes 5 GB of data,” meaning you will pay rather pricey overage rates if you download more than 5GB of data in a month. Unless all you do is check your email, and maybe do some light web surfing, you’re going to blow through that limit pretty quick. (And if you don’t do much more than that, it’s pretty hard to justify paying $60/month for mobile internet service for your laptop.) You’d better make sure your operating system or applications don’t run any software updates, otherwise you’re probably screwed.

Sure, data transfer doesn’t necessarily have too much to do with network congestion primarily caused by gazillions of short pings from smartphones polling for data, but that’s no excuse for such outlandish pricing schemes. If my 1Mb-per-second DSL line costs $45/month, and doesn’t have a transfer limit other than 1Mb x 60 x 60 x 24 x 30, or the amount you can grab in a month at the 1Mb/sec speed cap, why should something that does far less cost $60? For that $60 you get slower speeds, a tiny download cap, and the famous network congestion and spotty coverage that everyone’s always complaining about.

Why should you have to pay extra for so much less? As far as I’m aware, all of the wireless carriers that offer similar services charge similarly exorbitant rates. To date, I have yet to see one of them provide a satisfactory answer as to why they charge so much for practically nothing. (And then talk about throttling smartphone users who dare to use the service they paid for…) All we get are allusions to the suppositious “unique constraints” of wireless networks, and talk of how network neutrality regulations would not only be impractical, but would cripple the networks.