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Still Not Measuring Usage Correctly
Bell Canada’s Internet usage meter is still giving wildly inaccurate measurements of Internet usage, some customers allege.
Eleanor White, a Bell broadband customer, found Bell measuring some 30-44GB of usage, despite the fact the biggest bandwidth application in use by the account holder is a 16kbps audio stream running regularly throughout the day.
White estimates the monthly usage from that radio stream can’t be more than three gigabytes for the entire month, even leaving the stream running 16 hours a day.
“I hardly ever watch online video, and I estimate my usage from the radio stream and doubling it to account for e-mail reading and web browsing to be no more than 5.6GB a month,” White says. “But Bell measures at least 6-8 times as much, month after month.”
Bell’s usage meter has been implicated repeatedly for being inaccurate, occasionally by the company itself. But the tool remains online and Bell continues to maintain its Internet Overcharging schemes, even for customers on its hybrid fiber-copper Fibe network.
Customers accuse Bell of overmeasuring usage on Fibe broadband as well.
“From the moment I got switched to Fibe, my traffic [measurement] went through the roof, at least according to the traffic monitor,” says Jurjen. “[But that measurement doesn’t reflect] what we were actually using the Internet for.”
“Don’t try to get this solved; Bell won’t do anything (trust me, I tried for about five months),” Jurjen says. “The only solution: switch ISPs.”
Jurjen thinks the day holding Bell accountable for their broken usage meter is long overdue.
“For every service that you get billed by a unit, you must be certified by Measurements Canada. Just check your local gas station, it’ll have stickers all over. Same for your electricity provider,” Jurjen says.
“However, Bell is not certified by Measurements Canada. If you have a lot of spare time and money, do us a favor and start a trial against Bell.”
This doesn’t appear to apply to internet usage.
http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/mc-mc.nsf/eng/h_lm00008.html
“Any person or organisation wanting to sell electricity or gas on the basis of measurement must hold a certificate of registration issued under the authority of subsection 6(2) of the Electricity and Gas Inspection Act.”
I have been monitoring usage vs. Bell’s so called “meter” for 4 days and so far it is overestimating usage by just over 100%. The discrepancy is inconsistent. I plan on documenting the error on a daily basis and will report back to this thread. I am outraged at this blatant bandwidth extortion. The person responsible for this did not understand the overage fees and has been happily paying twice the baseline amount for these so-called overages.
Rigging the meter to pay for CEO George Cope’s lifestyle
Bell I bet is including overhead in their traffic counts if their meter isn’t broken 100%. DSL is known to have a ton of overhead by design.
I just remembered: Apparently there is a loophole in Bell’s Fibe service that allows you to get Unmetered service. I saw it on the Teksavvy forums over at DSLReports. Perhaps the person who is seeing issues with Bell Fibe could look into.
Even then, it’s amazing as to why they need data limits on a service they claim is Fiber Optic. It’s Fiber to the node, but data limits will not serve any purpose if you can make such claims even through twisted naming and offer some pretty decent speeds in the process.