Its very frustrating to live in Canada and seemingly be moving backwards with internet. We pay $50 a month for 60GB of data.

"For comparison, In the USA, Comcast -- who won the 'Worst Company in America' honour from Consumerist Magazine! -- gives 250gb for 30$ and at 20Mbps speed. We pay almost twice as much for a quarter the amount. Ours is SEVEN times more expensive per GB *and* only half as fast."

I could always pay $85 a month and get the absolute MAX any Ontario ISP offers at 125GB for a month. Ok, I guess the TV providers have won. Goodbye to my Netflix..

Canada is so different than our United States brother..

"For comparison, In the USA, Comcast -- who won the 'Worst Company in America' honour from Consumerist Magazine! -- gives 250gb for 30$ and at 20Mbps speed. We pay almost twice as much for a quarter the amount. Ours is SEVEN times more expensive per GB *and* only half as fast."

I just checked my comcast bill, it's a hair more than $30 for just the internet. I'm paying just under $60 a month for around 24-mbit download speeds. I think the $30 you are seeing is "for the first 6 months".

Still, 60 GB does stink. I think I typically hit around 40-50 GB a month on average (did almost hit the cap last month when I had to redownload a bunch of stuff after a computer crash).

That's bad, but you don't know the pain of some internet technology around here. Ever hear of Hughes.net? One of the worst ISPs in existence.

$75 per month or so gets you about 1-2Mbps downloads (100-200KB/s). The real kicker though is that you can't download more than 200MB per day. Guess what happens if you try. Your internet connection is nuked to 1.2KB/s (yes, 1200bps) for 24 full hours. Once per month you can reset it if you accidentally download too much.

The commercials are happy and cheerful about how you can download an entire album in the time it takes to download a single song on dial up. Just don't do much! Or else! 30 minutes on Youtube will wreck your connection for a day.

Got a large driver, disc image, Windows Updates, WoW patch, anything like that? Too bad, you're just flat SoL. You can download any amount from 2AM-6AM, but download rates during this period are so slow you can't get more than about 100MB. Best download a download manager and expect it to take 3 or 4 days to get that large file.

I put up with that at my parents house for years because nothing else was available. Rural areas can be tough for computer enthusiasts.

Yeah ISPs are becoming a scam. My parent's have 768 kbps since AT&T is a huge rip-off and they have a micro monopoly on our street. Those regional monopolies are everywhere nowadays it seems like where people don't really have much of a choice. Speaking of that though 4G on my phone is 8 mbps down and 1.5 mbps up. That's pretty sweet with unlimited data. (But the latency is a little higher).

I think the ISPs have realized that everyone is going to get 1 gbps sooner or later and the more they delay that the more money they'll get so they hold back on laying fiber. Though honestly part of the problem is the lack of competition and what I can only imagine is price fixing.

Damn that sucks for ALL you guys... I dont really think I have a bandwidth limit on my home connection, and if I do its not publicized (I Stream movies and youtube video all the time So I honestly doubt I have one) I wonder if and when bandwidth limits my hit NYC.

On another note I have a dedicated server that I pay 220$ a month for, for 10Terabytes of Bandwidth

While we don't have the bandwidth cap problem over here in France, the lack of reliability of email services from all major ISPs is becoming a huge problem. While anyone with half a brain will stay away from the ISP provided email addresses, most ISPs will nevertheless force you into using their own SMTP/IMAP server to send email, even over your own domain (they flat out block anything else). Of course their own SMTP server doesn't work half of the time, drops emails sporadically without warning or gets blacklisted by SpamAssassin every couple of months. So either you buy an expensive business contract (with unblocked ports, letting you use your own mail server) or you have to tunnel over a VPN just to get some email out.

A support tech guy from Orange, my ISP, once told me that they basically don't give a shit about email service anymore: "You know, unless you're a business customer, email is legacy infrastructure for us. We don't put any major manpower into keeping it working. All of our customers use social networks to stay in touch. Do you really need email ? You should use Facebook or MSN instead !".

Sad.

I live in rural Ontario, Canada. The best I can get is 5 GB/month at $60 or 10 GB/month at $75 with between 20 kbs and 250 kbs download speed, although the "cap" is floating: $5/GB after the first 10 GB with no upper limit. So, basically, I pay about $130/month for basic internet. This plan is no longer available: the competitor to my ISP (Bell) introduced a more expensive plan so my ISP (Rogers) matched their prices.

I do have choices: there are other ISPs in my area: they have lower speeds and higher data caps for similar prices but require very high setup fees. A 1000 foot tower in my back yard is more than I can afford, and the satellite company requires very expensive professional installation and pricey equipment rental for a large monthly fee not included in the subscription price.

My biggest problem is that I do not live in one of the large urban areas where the pipeline providers are busy skimming the cream off the market while engaged in the mutual sucking of the hind teat with the regulators. Where I live, competition has driven the price up.

I love Verizon Fios. I pay $65 / month for 25mb/s up and down.

I've really been tempted to start a political party here in Canada with a focus on telecom regulation, if not running on completely outlawing private telecom operations like Bell and Rogers. If I got enough people running with me to fill the needed seats, then I figure we could take majority on just a promise of $20 a month unlimited talk/text cellphones, $20 unlimited wireless data packages, $30 unlimited home internet, and free basic landlines.

The only 'real' problem is then what to do with the rest of term for government.

I've really been tempted to start a political party here in Canada with a focus on telecom regulation, if not running on completely outlawing private telecom operations like Bell and Rogers. If I got enough people running with me to fill the needed seats, then I figure we could take majority on just a promise of $20 a month unlimited talk/text cellphones, $20 unlimited wireless data packages, $30 unlimited home internet, and free basic landlines.

The only 'real' problem is then what to do with the rest of term for government.

It would take your full term to get those changes made. And then some. You'd be fighting a company with incredibly deep pockets. It would be a tough job to get everyone else to change their mind when the companies make such big "campaign contributions" to so many in power.