Shaw vs Telus

[Mr. Analog]

Southside eh?

[Darren Dirt]

:sigh: yes...

Go ahead, bring up what I said early this year when I moved north...

[Tom]

I think locality still matters, the fastest down I can get is 25Mb/s

That seems odd:



And thats with my firewall doing some traffic shaping.

Is that all they'll offer you? Or are you only testing over wifi?

[Thorin]

Mr. A., is it possible that you're on the Extreme plan (25Mb/s) and not the Broadband 50 plan (50Mb/s)?  It goes:

Lite	1Mb/s down	0.256Mb/s up
High-speed	7.5Mb/s down	0.512Mb/s up
Extreme	25Mb/s down	2.5Mb/s up
Broadband 50	50Mb/s down	3Mb/s up
Broadband 100	100Mb/s down	5Mb/s up
Broadband 250	250Mb/s down	15Mb/s up

They're also advertising gigabit internet to the home now: http://shaw.ca/Internet/Gigabit/

Cra-zazy

Some of the prices are pretty high, though.

[Lazybones]

Some of the prices are pretty high, though.

Even through it has no SLA those prices are CHEAP compared to what we have been paying for years for business class connections. Hell those top speeds clobber the line we use to serve the whole company.

[Mr. Analog]

Yep, still on Extreme, don't know how I forgot it lol

[Tom]

Some of the prices are pretty high, though.

Even through it has no SLA those prices are CHEAP compared to what we have been paying for years for business class connections. Hell those top speeds clobber the line we use to serve the whole company.

The prices now are better than they were a year ago. Basically the bare (no tv) 50mbps plan is about where extreme used to be. And extreme without tv is 40-50. Which I think is reasonable.

[Thorin]

The downside to Shaw is that they now have bandwidth caps that they are enforcing (they bump you up to the next package for the month, if you go over your limit, then move you back down at the start of the following month).  With that wonderfully-fast connection, it's easy to hit those caps.  ESPECIALLY when you find out about a 48-hour freeleech period on your favourite torrent site

Check out Dec 23 - 31 (8 days) vs Jan 1 - 3 (2 days).  Guess when the freeleech period was

[Tom]

The downside to Shaw is that they now have bandwidth caps that they are enforcing (they bump you up to the next package for the month, if you go over your limit, then move you back down at the start of the following month).  With that wonderfully-fast connection, it's easy to hit those caps.  ESPECIALLY when you find out about a 48-hour freeleech period on your favourite torrent site

Check out Dec 23 - 31 (8 days) vs Jan 1 - 3 (2 days).  Guess when the freeleech period was

If you stick with the old plans, there is no enforcing unless you go /way/ over the limit (which is 250G for Extreme).

But to be honest, I have a 400G limit, and I download quite a bit. I haven't once gone over afaik, and most months I'm under 200GB. I can forsee that going up in the future, but for now, 250-300GB is probably my max.

[Thorin]

If you stick with the old plans, there is no enforcing unless you go /way/ over the limit (which is 250G for Extreme).

But to be honest, I have a 400G limit, and I download quite a bit. I haven't once gone over afaik, and most months I'm under 200GB. I can forsee that going up in the future, but for now, 250-300GB is probably my max.

Yeah, so, I also have the 400GB limit, and I also download quite a bit...  207GB in two days combined down and up.  207GB in two days equals 103.5GB in one day equals 4.3125GB in one hour equals 71.875MB in one minute equals 1.1979MB in one second, all averages.  Given that at the start of freeleech I was over 4MB/s for hours, but by the end I was at a mere 0.7MB/s (damn seeders capping their upload :-P ), a continuous combined down+up of 1.2MB/s sounds about right.

Going the other way, 207GB in two days equals 724.5GB in one week equals 3,208.5GB in the month of January.  So, my average speed was only a quarter of maximum possible (48Mbit/s = 6MB/s, and I saw peaks of 4.79MB/s and 4.8MB/s down + 0.4MB/s up), and at that speed I could have still downloaded over 3 terabytes, or 8 times my cap!

Good lord, I'd have to buy three more drives to put in the Drobo just to store it all!

Extreme (no longer offered):
  down: 25Mbit/s = 3.125MB/s * 2,678,400s/month = 8,370GB/month
  up: 2.5Mbit/s = 0.3125MB/s * 2,678,400s/month = 837GB/month
  max down+up: 9,207GB
  cap: 250GB (2.72% of max down+up)

High Speed 20:
  down: 20Mbit/s = 2.5MB/s * 2,678,400s/month = 6,696GB/month
  up: 0.512Mbit/s = 0.064MB/s * 2,678,400s/month = 171.42GB/month
  max down+up: 6,867.42GB
  cap: 200GB (2.91% of max down+up)

Broadband 50:
  down: 50Mbit/s = 6.25MB/s * 2,678,400s/month = 16,740GB/month
  up: 3Mbit/s = 0.375MB/s * 2,678,400s/month = 1,004.4GB/month
  max down+up: 17,744.4GB
  cap: 400GB (2.25% of max down+up)

Broadband 250:
  down: 250Mbit/s = 31.25MB/s * 2,678,400s/month = 83,700GB/month
  up: 15Mbit/s = 1.875MB/s * 2,678,400s/month = 5,022GB/month
  max down+up: 88,722GB/month
  cap: 1,000TB (1.13% of max down+up)

Phew, that's a lot of math!  Note how small of a percentage the cap is of the total theoretically-possible speed, though.  It would be surprisingly easy to go over your limit in a couple of days (if my usage stayed the same I would have cracked the 31 day cap in 3.5 days).

It also shows that they're still expecting people to only use their internet at full capacity _some_ of the time, or else they have a _crapload_ of extra bandwidth available that's not being tapped!

Anyway, the point of my post about caps is that Telus hasn't been able to separate its internet and IPTV packets properly, so can't measure, so doesn't enforce caps for anyone with Optik TV.  Whereas Shaw has figured it out and will bump people up to more expensive plans to cover the extra data usage.

[Tom]

Do you really see yourself going over the 400GB/mo on a regular basis? I thought I was going to use a lot more than I do. And I download quite a bit.

[Thorin]

Remember, two desktops, two laptops, three smartphones, two iPod Touches, and a DS that all use the wireless, used by six different people.  And when the kids can't use the main TV to watch TV, they do it on one of these other devices, at as high as possible a resolution as they can find on Youtube or TV sites like Hulu.  And at least one plays online a whole bunch, and all of them Facebook (and many of the Facebook games aren't exactly nice to your bandwidth).

Do I think I'll go over the 400GB limit?  No, but only because I'll be watching the usage and managing it.  However, I'm not downloading whole seasons of TV shows for the next couple of weeks, to manage it.  Which sucks if there's a series I really wanna see from scratch.  I'm at 217GB after four days now (so gained 10GB over two days).

[Mr. Analog]

EVERYBODY TO THE LIMIT

[Darren Dirt]

EVERYBODY get in the habit of insta-switching to 360 from 480+ on Youtube

^ ez solution to your problem

[Tom]

Heh. I have my XBMC box set to pick 720p by default.