mon petit blogue sans importance...

Vidéotron's and Bell's deceptive tactics and internet access ripoffs

It's funny how we hear about Vidéotron's Ultimate Speed 50 Mbps access, and now Bell's Fibe 25 Mbps access (i can't link directly to the service - click on Fibe 25) and we're told how great they are. They're actually both humongous ripoffs, if you have even basic math skills and 5 minutes ahead of you. Why? They both advertise those great speeds, but hidden behind those figures, in very small print, behind 2-3 clicks from the product pages, you'll find abysmal monthly transfer caps. This means that, yes you have a very fast connection. But if you were to use it fully, you'd very quickly fall into a lot of debt.

Vidéotron's transfer cap for their 50 Mbps service is at 100GB/month combined up/down – this means you will bust your cap within 5 *hours* if you were to fill your pipe. In turn, this means that you simply CANNOT reasonably use this service. Note that i'm taking all those numbers as being base-10. I.e., 5Mbps == 5e6 bits per second. 50GB == 50e9 bytes.

If you used your connection for 3 hours per day but wanted to stay within your cap (as overages are extremely expensive and UNLIMITED! there is no cap on the overage charges!), you’d have to stick to about 2 Mbps average speed.

80$/month for such a connection is starting to sound like quite a ripoff.

They offer an extra 30GB of transfer for 12.97$/month. You can get up to 3 such packages, but you have to get them in advance and keep them for at least 30 days – they won’t automatically add them if you went over the limit. Going over the limit costs $1.50/GB.

So, if we take the base service and add 3 30GB packages, we’re now at $117.50/month. Now it’ll take you ~8.5h to exceed your cap. If you were to use your service fully – at 50Mbps – for the whole month, you would get a bill for $24132.50. Granted, that’s a lot of data. But i just want to point out how ridiculous the terms of that offer are – it should not be legal.

It CANNOT and should not be advertised as a 50Mbps service.

See the product page for details and to check my math.

Bell's 25Mbps service has a - get this - 20GB transfer cap on it. They offer an extra 40GB for 5$/month. The base rate is $64.95/month (after 12 months). They also do not seem to cap the overage charges, though, unlike Vidéotron, they don't mention it on the website (they did mention the overage charges were capped back when they were, so i assume they're not anymore. The overage is charged at the whopping rate of $2.50/GB. So, if we take the base service + the extra 40GB, we'll get to that limit within about 5.3 hours. If you use your connection 3 hours a day, you shouldn't use more than 1.5Mbps if you don't want to pay the overage charges. And what if you were to use your connection full-tilt, full-time (which may well happen if you get infected with a trojan which then uses your computer as a spambot, sending emails as fast as it can and serving the spam executables to all other infected machines)? You'll get a bill for $8019.95. Better start saving up.

Check my math against the official information (click Fibe 25) if you want.

All i have is a 5Mbps connection from Teksavvy. But for $43.95 i have no transfer cap at all, a fixed IP, and immediate access to support techs who'll know what i'm talking about, and won't ask me if my computer is plugged-in when i tell them my modem won't sync with the DSLAM. But they can't offer more than 5Mbps.

I honestly don't understand how the media isn't picking up on Bell and Vidéotron's tactics, and how this can be legal. To be it's completely false advertising: they advertise great speeds (barely on par with the international market, though), which you can't reasonably use. All this needs is a lawsuit.

When will we get decent internet access in Canada???

Now, don't go and tell me that the only ones who would use such connections are pirates who illegally download movies. Firstly, there's more and more fully legal HD video online. A family using their 50Mbps connection to watch HD video a few hours a day would definitely run into their transfer cap. The other, more scary thing is all those computers infected with trojans. You have no idea what these will do. Some will sit there and send spam as fast as they can. That's why both Bell and Videotron block outgoing emails that bypasses their own email servers. But trojans can do lots of other things. One example is that once your computer is infected, the trojan will usually go and download another piece of software. Your computer might become a hub for serving those files, and you can very easily run into your transfer cap that way. Sure, it's in a way your fault for not having detected that your computer is infected. But many viruses and worms aren't detected by any software. It's very difficult to keep a windows machine uninfected.

If Bell and Vidéotron were the slightest bit honest about all this, they'd lock your connection to your cap, so that if you were to run into the transfer cap, your speed would drop - say, to 1Mbps. They'd also send you an email telling you about it. You'd have the choice to remove that lock, but by default it would be there. They could do smarter things, but this is easy, and works - i have to assume they're both dumb and malicious companies at this point, judging from their behavior.

Now, look at Wind Mobile. They does smart things with their Data Plans. They are unlimited transfer mobile data plans. But if their network is congested, they'll throttle the subscriber who have transferred over 5GB of data in the month. They won't bill them overage, they won't kill your connection, they'll just throttle it. If they have to. If you went over this soft limit. That's it. THAT'S HONEST. They're doing this because they don't want everyone from being negatively impacted by a tiny few who would hog the network. Bell and Vidéotron claim that their caps are for these reasons. If they truely were, they'd implement a simple policy like Wind Mobile's to make sure their network stays uncongested. But they don't. If you go over your quota and it's 3am and Vidéotron's local network is barely being used, and their outgoing pipe is just sitting there, they'll still charge you thousands of dollars.

That is complete bullshit.

by wiswaud on 17 February 2010
Tags: english, geeky, screwtheman