Canada to see 100mb/s Fiber

[faethor]

Shaw Launches Canada's Fastest Inter City Fibre-Optic Network

Network makes Shaw first provider in Canada capable of carrying Internet, voice, video and data at 100 Gigabits per second

CALGARY, Alberta, Nov. 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Shaw communications announced the next generation of Canada's fastest Internet, with the launch of the nation's first 100 Gigabit per second (Gbit/s) fibre-optic network.
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Congrats! The average 1Mb/s US service is jealous.

 

[Glaucus]

Not available in my area yet. The best I can do here is 50Mbps for a monthly rate of $60 so long as I subscribe to other shaw services. And that's with a 400GB/month data cap. Not bad, but those caps should be lifted. Once the offer us the 100Mbps the cap will go up to 500GB/month.

These are great plans for the BitTorrent generation, but the Harper government will soon pass laws making it easy for BTers to get sued. That will make these types of plans kinda useless as who needs 100Mbps? I'm pretty sure these are for residential customers so I'm not sure they'd let you run a small business off of that. My 7.5Mpbs connection is already more than enough. But I do feel sorry for you in the US, not sure how you guys got so shafted in this department.

 

[redrumloa]

These caps are all a joke for anyone who uses services like Netflix.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

These caps are all a joke for anyone who uses services like Netflix.

Except they are not funny.
But they are probably there to kill Netflix. Cable companies would much rather you buy from them. Watch Shaw put up a competing service. Movies is what gigabit is for.

 

[Glaucus]

Ya, if you watch an HD netflix movie every night (and I believe netflix allows two streams, so you can easily double that) you could easily blow past most data caps. Netflix was smart to allow people to choose the quality of video (low quality == lower bitrate) so they can stay within their data cap limits.

Interestingly, there have been months where I have completely blown past my data cap and Shaw has never charged me extra.

What irks me about these plans is that they tie the bit rate to the data cap. The two should be independent. If you play games, you may want a faster response, but the overall data is quite low. Same with video chatting or anything else done in realtime. But some movie rentals, like that provided by Sony via PlayStation Network, allows you to download before watching, meaning, the download speed may not matter so much, but the data cap does because Sony provides HD movies. Even Netflix requires a bitrate of around 5Mbps or so, anything on top of that will be wasted. The CRTC should force the ISPs to allow the customers to choose their own combination of bitrate and data cap. Or even better, remove the data cap as it's really not important. The only thing that should matter to an ISP is peak bandwidth traffic.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Interestingly, there have been months where I have completely blown past my data cap and Shaw has never charged me extra.

They aren't enforcing it yet - they don't have their services ready to go.

As to how the monthly cap should be calculated it should be: bit rate per second multiplied by the number of seconds in a month. That's the bandwidth you are paying for and if there are times of the day that you can't get that bandwidth because they oversold their pipes then you aren't getting the advertized bitrate 24/7.

 

[Glaucus]

As to how the monthly cap should be calculated it should be: bit rate per second multiplied by the number of seconds in a month. That's the bandwidth you are paying for and if there are times of the day that you can't get that bandwidth because they oversold their pipes then you aren't getting the advertized bitrate 24/7.

I totally agree.

And overselling their bandwidth is exactly what they do. That is why people who defend things like packet throttling drive me up the wall. The ISP should sell me bandwidth and nothing more. What I do with it is my business.