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BendBroadband introduces a new logo and tagline
BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better be good.”
What some BendBroadband customers didn’t realize was that dog comes with a leash.
“The new speeds sound great, right until you read the fine print and discover the awful usage allowances they attach to them,” writes Seth, a Stop the Cap! reader. “That’s Bend (Over) Broadband.”
BendBroadband plans range from 8Mbps service for $36.95 a month ($46.95 broadband-only), 14Mbps service for $44.95 a month ($54.95 broadband-only), and a forthcoming Gold 25Mbps plan for $54.95 a month ($64.95 broadband-only). The 14Mbps service represents a speed increase for their current Silver plan. All of these plans have a 100GB usage allowance, with a $1.50/GB overlimit penalty.
A new Platinum plan will offer 60Mbps service for $89.95 a month ($99.95 broadband-only), yet only incrementally bumps the usage cap up by 50GB, to 150GB per month.
BendBroadband's dog comes with a leash... 100GB Usage Caps
Company officials seemed pleased with themselves.
“Who would of believed ten years ago that we would have these types of speeds available?” said Frank Miller, the company’s Chief Technology Officer. “60Mbps…that’s one fast puppy!”
“That dog (logo) has broadband rabies and needs to be put down,” replies Seth’s wife Angelica, who telecommutes and does most of her work from home.
“Central Oregon can be wowed by the speed, but what good is it if you can’t use it without running into their usage caps and limits,” she asks.
“I’d pay for the premium tiers and get on a waiting list today if they did away with the usage caps. There is no way I am paying to support a company that sticks usage caps on their customers and makes me waste time doublechecking how much I’ve used this month,” she said.
Seth and Angelica have taken a pass on BendBroadband’s dog show and are sticking with the local phone company’s DSL service until something better comes along.
“The speed isn’t the best, but at least you can use the service and not have to worry about it,” Seth writes.
Devil’s advocate 1: maybe bandwidth is expensive on the provider end. Devil’s advocate 2: Bend’s packages are similarly priced or less expensive than equivalent-downstream packages in big cities. Devil’s advocate 3: Bend has 150GB caps on all their business-class services, and a 500GB cap on their 60 Mbps business tier. Devil’s advocate: Band has competition, though the competition is SIGNIFICANTLY slower and thus Bend can compete on speed and bundle pricing (they have great bundle pricing) rather than data transfer. Qwest tops out at 896k – overhead up… That said, Bend’s lack of upload speed on their DOCSIS 3 tiers… Read more »
Does Seth and Angelica have any idea how much bandwidth they use? It’s extremely likely they don’t even use half of the alloted 100-150GB every month BendBroadband offers. Everyone views the cap as a threat, but in reality it probably effects less than 1% of customers. I stream several hours of Netflix HD and Hulu videos and remote VPN to work nightly as well as weekly game demos and xbox live gaming and the most i have used in a single month is 78GB. 1.5Mbps may be low for upload speeds but that exceeds the competition and will grow larger… Read more »
Does the company provide them with tools to find out how much bandwidth they’re using in the current month? How close are such tools to real time? If I’m pissed at my neighbor, can I use my DSL line to generate a constant stream of packets that causes them to go over limit? According to their site, both upload and download count against the limit. Where does $1.50/GB come from? That’s ridiculously high. 100GB might be reasonable depending on the capabilities of their network and cost to them, but unless excess bandwidth really costs them $1.50/GB, they should be charging… Read more »
Yes, Andrew. When you log in, you can find out your usage. We don’t bother with broadband from Bend so I do not know how accurate it is. Most people around here never log in to see, until they get a whopping bill from Bend for going over, and then they watch it like a hawk. We decided to hold a family meeting and decide together what was more important – speed or the usage cap. It was unanimous for us. We decided it was much more important to not have to worry about everything we do online. As long… Read more »
We’d love to know how you stream several hours of Netflix HD and Hulu videos (every night/week/month?) and VPN and only consume 78GB. We routinely approach 200GB per month. We have three kids, two boys 16 and 18 and a daughter who is 14. My husband works in an office but routinely takes home work, and I generally work from home and am on the computer most of the day. When the kids get home from school, it’s Facebook, Hulu, iTunes, etc. The router we have tells us how much we consume each month and it has been pretty steady.… Read more »
I call shenanigans on your bandwidth usage. I do all the same, and I hover around 90Gb a month. Right now I am at 87.29Gb, and I havn’t streamed much netflix this month at all. I did download the free DDO game and patches. But I tend to try out at least 1 game a month anyways like that.
DDO? OMG, I can’t even install that game. It tries to install some spyware which won’t run on my system and hence won’t let me download the game.
Sounds like Seth and Angelica need to get a life.
Troll
LOL, sounds like “Bend-over” broadband to me. Once you go past the cap, you better know how to take it because they are going to give you stick with that $1.50/GB. And where do these companies actually get these arbitrary numbers like $1/GB or $1.50GB? Not even premium news servers charge that much for data. @DigitalReaper X Think that it will always be 78GB bud? Usage is going up not down. These ISP’s know it and want to cash in on the cow. And why would you want a cap in the first place? Do you really want to spend… Read more »
AngelaS … do you think that the kids with the torrent, or the other kids P2P’ing away, are sending legal content or are torrenting off stuff that the RIAA would love to subpoena? Sorry man, I aveage about 60GB at home and use AppleTV and watch a few HD moveis a week along with running a web and SMTP server. Now, when college break comes we watch for the load because lo and behold … the kids torrenting up current movies. I think that the 150GB is so far over the norm that you are hooting about … well …… Read more »
I call bull when I see it. How many is a few HD Movies a week? Once HD movie from Netflix is about 5Gbs. What is a few? 4 per week? That would be that would be 20Gb per week times 4 is 80Gb per month right there not counting anything else. Either you don’t really stream that many movies, or you don’t really know how much bandwidth your using. In todays day and age, it is not just P2P. Download that Batman Arkham Asylum trailer or demo, see how much that adds.
It looks like we are going to pass 110GB for the month of September here. I can easily see Angela’s family going well beyond that with her teens and their family video use. We have two people in this house — one has been watching Stargate, the show that ran for… what 800 seasons? The other (me) has been uploading content, making system backups, and I download out of print music from some of the music blogs (I have musical tastes that are completely contrary to those of my peers). Then there is the 600 megs I download every month… Read more »
Stargate! :3
I’ve begun watching Stargate SG-1 again on Hulu, and I finally got around to catching up with the missed episodes of Stargate Atlantis on there as well. I find that each episode in 420p H.264 takes up at least 350MB per episode. If there are any in HD, each would certainly be over a gigabyte. Just wait until Stargate Universe starts airing sometime very soon 🙂
My DSL lines are nearing 300GB of usage this month combined, the Frontier line having much of that usage on it.
SG1 rocked and I was dismayed why Scifi, excuse me SyFy, canceled it even after 10 season. It was one of their strongest shows! SGA was ok and it was actually getting good but it too was canceled only after 5 seasons due to Syfy’s infinite wisdom I suppose. Two of the best science fiction shows on TV and they are gone!! Hopefully, SGU, coming this Oct. 2, won’t be a big disappointment. I hope they don’t make it a Battlestar Galactica like show. The characters on that show got annoying after awhile.
You point out a good thing, and ever since SG-1 and Atlantis stopped showing on TV, I haven’t tuned into SciFi “SyFy” or Channel 122 since, or for that matter watched more than an hour of TV a week except when perhaps a local sports team was playing. Bad move in my opinion as I always was looking forward to the weekend to watch Stargate. I already have my DVR (standard definition) set to start recording every episode of Stargate Universe, so I’m hoping it turns out to be good. Perhaps for the first episode I should head over to… Read more »
Tim on NetNeutrality … the fricking wireless companies prioritize and block traffic … RIGHT NOW. Bloody apple doesn’t even let you run google voice. And … their caps and overage fees are in the $/MB not $/GB. Where is all the fricking whining about that. Jeez, I want unlimited data wireless service … blah … blah … blah. Net N was funded by the idoiots at Google. Privacy, they track your searches, what web page you came from and where you are going, and drop cookies to track uniqeness … to guess your behavior … and SELL it to adveritising.… Read more »
I thought most of the wireless carriers, at least in the US, cap their plans at 5GB not 5MB. Anyways, we have detailed articles on this site opposing those caps. But don’t think people are just sitting idly by and doing nothing just because their voice isn’t as loud as it is on the land-line broadband side. Google? Google isn’t the only company to benefit from Net Neutrality. How about game companies such as Blizzard, Valve, EA, ect.? How about video rental services such as Netflix or Apple as you mentioned? How about online backup services like Carbonite? How about… Read more »
We bitch about wireless carriers and data plans here all the time, just this past week. I just completed a focus group online about wireless data plans. I was thrown perhaps 50 options and said “not interested” on every last one because they combined high pricing with low caps. When asked why I was not interested, I told them. As to Net Neutrality, I don’t understand this Google conspiracy theory stuff. Google is not the primary proponent of Net Neutrality. I never had a problem with targeted advertising cookies because it’s not like there is some evildoer sitting there watching… Read more »
Right now on my DSL lines, I’m guaranteed to use at least 1.2GB a day on the download itself. On a good day you’ll be looking around 4-10GB daily with the lines combined, and yes I do seed torrents at night quite frequently, typically the large Linux ISO or something else. Last night I used 3GB of upload bandwidth seeding torrents, with both lines uploading at 390kbps (the fastest each line will go). When new versions of Ubuntu come out, I’m seeding day and night until the downloads slow. Caps aren’t hard to get to at all as stated above,… Read more »
This is how ridiculous these caps are. Through my Usenet provider Astraweb, premium account, I can buy 25GB for $10. That is 2.5GB/$1. Or even better, I can buy 180GB for $25 dollars which is 7.2GB/$1, even better. Break it down per GB and it is $0.40/GB for the $10 25GB plan and $0.13 for the $25 180GB plan. Wow, I don’t see how these guys stay in business with bandwidth being so expensive, $1/GB or $1.50/GB. Maybe they could get a bail out too? But wait it gets better!! They offer unlimited too which is what I use. In… Read more »
At some point companies like Google, Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, etc., MUST jump on the anti-cap bandwagon. And what about all the ads, emailed photos, software updates and other maintenance issues that aren’t taken into account because people are used to the lack of a cap? Two years on Wildblue taught me a harsh lesson about caps. I started with 10G a month and we did OK with an occasional throttle, but once they lopped 2.5G off the cap it was insane. There are four of us in the house including two teenagers. I got sick to death of being the… Read more »
Hulu and Netflix are essentially held at hostage of the large media companies, the margins for both products are much much lower than conventional tv. The conglomerate media companies understand that distribution is essentially being undercut through the internet, they understand that there will be an inevitable death in their distribution business model and they will go out kicking and screaming. Google can only do so much, if the isps which are essentially regional duopolies with an occasional overbuilder do not cooperate it is the end of the line. The isps/wireless telco are terrified of net neutrality, with net neutrality… Read more »
Another example of the Great Limbo Cap Dance. Once they establish them, they find excuses to LOWER them. It happened in Canada when Bell, the dominant national DSL provider, lowered the caps on their service. And you can be sure that won’t stop the next price increase either. Satellite is the Gitmo of broadband. Yet many rural Americans are imprisoned with that being their only option. Verizon will probably grandfather in your existing Alltel plan. The only restriction will be you are stuck with the same basic features within the scope of that plan. If you change anything major, you… Read more »
Tired of their lousy service over the years. Bad taste in the mouth.
http://i881.photobucket.com/albums/ac16/dumpit09/bendbroadband-logo-local-dog.gif
Bend Broadbands 100 gig limit is actualy only 93.13 gig, they use multiples of 1000 not 1024
1024 bytes = 1kB, 1024 kB = 1mB, 1024 mB = 1gB