How much would you pay for a 3.0 Mb/sec DSL connection?  $50?  $100?  $300?

Telus Wants $2 a Gig

This is the question that some families and many net users will be asking shortly as Telus seems about ready to start charging for usage past their monthly limits.  The bandwidth limits are nothing new but, unlike Shaw, Telus has never made a real fuss over people who have excessive amounts of traffic.  In the last three years my monthly transfer has been between 140 and 210 Gigabytes.

Shaw used to suspend my service when I was 10 GB over limit, while the worst Telus has ever done was send me an email asking that I slow down.

I share my internet with a few others and two of us are heavy downloaders.  The situation is the same for two of my neighbours who have kids between the ages of 14 and 20.  The advantage that I have over my neighbours is some centralized network storage that allows the people I share with to enjoy some of the same things that we all download.

So why the sudden change?  Well, after a quick discussion with someone at their customer service centre, it seems that a very high number of users are moving more than their allotted bandwidth.  So, in an effort to both bring usage down to managable levels and make a buck, Telus has decided to start charging for excessive usage.  And to think, I just got my connection issues solved ….

So it looks like many of us will soon be asking ourselves just how much some of our activities are worth.  Come the end of the month, would we really want to risk paying $2 to download episodes of Daily Show or Colbert Report?  Would we be willing to pay that rate to play online games such as Pangya or some MMORPG?  Just how badly do we want to download that new album that’s available?

It might be time to start looking for open WiFi connections again ….