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Shaw Communications, western Canada’s largest cable company, has expanded its High-Speed Nitro DOCSIS 3 broadband service in British Columbia and Alberta. Offering speeds of 100Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream, Shaw charges customers $149 per month for the new plan, assuming you also subscribe to other Shaw services. The three latest cities to obtain upgraded service join Victoria in British Columbia, Saskatoon in Saskatchewan, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, where upgrades were unveiled earlier this year.
“The expansion of High-Speed Nitro into the cities of Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver demonstrates Shaw’s commitment to continually enhancing our Internet services to meet our customers’ changing needs,” said Peter Bissonnette, President, Shaw Communications Inc.
Paying $150 a month doesn’t buy you unlimited broadband, however. Despite the premium price, Shaw insists on slapping a usage allowance of 400 gigabytes per month. While at first glance that limit seems generous, particularly compared with Comcast’s 250GB limit, paying $150 a month for Internet access apparently is not enough to spare their most generous customers from a pesky Internet Overcharging scheme.
Jeff from Calgary, a Stop the Cap! reader writes, “exactly how much profit does Shaw need to earn from customers before they turn the damn meter off?”
“It’s bad enough with a 100GB limit on their so-called High-Speed Extreme plan, which gives my family up to 15Mbps service for $45 a month. If I am going to pay them $100 more a month for service, there shouldn’t even be a limit,” he adds.
The High-Speed Extreme plan seems to be the pricing “sweet spot” for Shaw, because the next step up in Calgary is High-Speed Warp, which brings 25Mbps service for the warped high price of $96 a month. For nearly twice the price, Shaw only throws another 50GB towards customers’ usage allowances, limiting service to 150GB per month.
Other stories of interest:
- Shaw Cable Launches Price War in Vancouver – $9.95/Month Sparks Complaint from Competitor Novus
- Novus-Shaw Price War Communique – Shaw Files Defamation Suit Against Novus
- Shaw Steamrolling Through British Columbia in “Sell To Us Or Die” Strategy
- Cogeco Follows Rogers: Introduces New “Ultimate HSI” Package for $149 a Month… With 150GB Cap
- HissyFitWatch: Shaw & Rogers Non-Compete Agreement Tossed, Allowing Shaw Acquisition of Mountain Cablevision
Shaw would probably charge 1,000 dollars a month for unlimited usage
Sigh, who cares about 100Mb/sec download service? I mean, it sounds good and all but how often are you going to hit that? On Usenet I could but these other websites I download from, I don’t even get 12Mb/sec download except for a few. Personally, I would rather have 20/20 or 50/50 service than 100/5. In other words, these guys need to let loose the upload speed because 5Mb/sec compared to 100Mb/sec is just dumb. Also, throw a 400GB cap on top of that for a line you are paying $150 for, I sure as hell wouldn’t pay for it.
Did they also increase the upload up from nothing to relatively nothing?
I would pay $150 a month for a connection that didn’t castrate my ability to run cheap VoIP/Web/File/Gaming/Email servers, or hell, let me send a home movie to a friend in less than a week.
It’s a new tier, so the upload speed is new to Shaw. Their lower tiers still seem to be on the anemic pre-DOCSIS 3 side. Shaw’s Wave service is 25/2 with a 150GB cap.
Cable broadband services seem reluctant to dramatically increase upload speed even with DOCSIS 3. True fiber to the home connections seem to be the future for synchronous (same upload/download) speeds.
I wouldn’t call DOCSIS 2.0 anemic; tuned correctly it can provide 30 Mbps down and 15 Mbps up, though anything above 5 Mbps up is generally reserved for DOCSIS 3 tiers. Cablevision is the only 30+/5 provider on DOCSIS 2.
Remember that DOCSIS 3.0 at this point is just a moniker for downstream channel bonding; upstream channels, whatever they might be, are still the same speed. Hence the wildly unbalanced tiers that cable is promoting all over the place.
Want more info? Well, to my knowledge everyone on DOCSIS in North America except Comcast, Cox and Cablevision are still using DOCSIS 1.1 for upload channels. They *might* have DOCSIS 2.0 enabled for uploads but being DOCSIS 1.1 only easily explains why uploads are limited to 5 Mbps: you can’t get much more out of the spec. Converely, when I switched to Comcast’s 50/10 tier for a bit to try it out I got 20 Mbps up on PowerBoost. So the tech is there, but using it is a whole other matter.
FWIW, $150/400GB is actually a better deal than $46/100GB, though both are crappy in my opinion. If you’re going to cap my speed, make sure to cap transfer amounts with a decreasing per-GB price gradient ending in 20¢/GB or so. Or allow me to pick my speed and transfer cap independently, so if I want tons of speed but won’t use my connection for much, I shouldn’t be charged $150 for the privelege of a fast connection five minutes out of the day.
Another FWIW: Novus (the Canadian fiber operator) also has caps, and they’re also rather spendy per GB. That said, they actually offer really high speeds and caps high enough on “normal” tiers that you won’t run into them every time you turn around. Want 500+ GB per month? It’s $250 for the privilege, but you do get a blistering 60 Mbps of upload and download speed. Would be nice if Novus made the tier 100/50 or 100/100 to beat Shaw at their own game, but you’re still looking at a connection faster than practically any server can provide. For something on the lighter side, 20/20 fiber is $80 and has a rather reasonable 180GB cap. Or for light users, 20 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up service with a 110 GB cap is a mere $37.50 per month, CAD.
I’d take 20 Mbps symmetric though, and torrent elsewhere.
I Except that Shaw Communications will expand , Its Broadband services in Other Countries So that others users will also enjoy this speed
Well – I took the service on Wednesday and finally got around to doing some downloads. As was said previously Usenet users will love it – and I do. I get a continuous download of 10megabytes a second which is just under 4 times faster than their previous top offering. My poor laptop gave up and had to keep pausing the queue but I’ll stick the beast on the end tomorrow and see how it goes. The upload is pretty fine as well for a home user. If I want to run servers then I pay my $10 per month to a service provider for it.
On the note of Caps – I run my Usenet download at an average of 155gig a month so I was 50% over the previous cap but well under this cap so I’m not bothered. And that’s only Usenet. I can see my usage skyrocketing this month and next when the Oscar screeners come out but I doubt I will be anything major – my biggest month ever was only 750gig from Usenet when I was new to Usenet and I was off sick for a month. So the whole question of caps is pretty moot – in MY humble opinion.
So far – happy. Worth it – I think so – but only just.
p.s. PEople I feel sorry for are those that get the service and can’t seem to figure out why they don’t get monster speed. Completely forgetting that a goodly proportion of them at home now use wireless and that makes the 100meg service suck.