I like the local guys, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to tolerate an inaccurate gauge.

There are no caps or limits in countries like Japan, South Korea, and Sweden, so how exactly does Canada’s ISPs justify themselves?

Seriously, Canada’s government has totally failed its people in this case. What a joke that companies can make so many billions in profit yet still hold hostage and abuse *an entire nation* of consumers.

Sure, a newly elected government might fix the situation, but no one’s going to force these ISPs to give back the money they stole from people. It’s a sad, sad case of democracy falling to the selfish interests of the ruling party.

If a website ever becomes popular on one of those hosts, they cut you off for overusing their capacity. That’s why those traffic and disk space allowances seem so high – you are usually thrown out before you come close to nearing them.

My reason for saying this is simple: I had a nightmarish run-in with Earthlink, which hosts my web site. My normal monthly bill is $20. Then one month some time back I found that they had charged me $139 for a single month, claiming I had gone way over my monthly transfer allotment. I checked their official gas gauge, and it said I was just under my limit for the month. I called CS and wound up having an incredibly frustrating conversation with one of their reps. He kept insisting that I agree to monitor my usage and recognize that I was responsible for overages, and I kept telling him that I did monitor it (which I had), and that according to THEIR numbers I had not gone over their sacred limit.

The conversation got louder and more pointed, and went in circles until he agreed to roll back the extra $119 charge just this one time–and then insisted yet again that I agree to the terms mentioned above.

This is the point we need to drive home to the mainstream consumers: Tiered service levels and bandwidth limits results in a major, ongoing hassle for the consumer. The company will screw up the billing and metering, and even if they don’t, the average customer has a constant chore of watching the household’s usage, month in and month out. I am convinced that this is the real cost they want to impose on consumers: They want it to be such a huge inconvenience that customers won’t even consider watching online media and getting within 20% of their monthly limit.

Communicate the reality of living with tiered service and caps to the average customer, and I guarantee that the uproar the next time TW tries to impose this new system will be much louder than it was last time.

Maybe my understanding is wrong, but I was under the impression they were still rolling out the gauge as part of their re-education campaign to make it a softer blow when it comes up again but people at least have a way to see how much they “actually use”.

I’ll (dis-)believe it when I see it (or more accurately when I compare their numbers to my own from my router behind their modem).