There’s quite a bit of yelling done on the internet about how terrible the broadband situation is in the States, but it’s just as bad, if not worse, up here in Canada. Despite having an inordinate amount of our population in dense urban centres along the US-Canada border, our telecommunication companies (telcos) still struggle to provide 5-8 Mbps. Recently, I’ve noticed that Rogers and Bell, our much hated duopoly, are both offering a higher speed internet for around $100 a month. We get the luxury of 16 Mbps with Bell and 18 Mbps with Rogers on the downstream, and they both offer 1 Mbps upload. Of course these speeds, while being a nice step up from the woefully bad offerings they provide to normal people, are all asterisked with “Up to” essentially meaning they offer absolutely no guarantee that you will actually achieve those speeds. Those are not atypical conditions with cable and DSL internet, and to get an actual guarantee you need to spend hundreds of dollars per month on a T1 line (which is slower than most cable offerings, but offers a promise of consistent speeds and connections) or a fibre-optic connection or some other absurdly expensive alternative. So the speed being a maximum and not an average is something I’ve come to expect. But one thing they add on to these offerings is a bandwidth cap.

Let’s do some math, shall we? Assuming you were lucky enough to get the consistent maximum speed of Rogers, the faster of the two, that means you would download at around 18 Megabits per second which is 2.25 Megabytes per second. That’s pretty good. Its not the 100 Megabits per second you can get in any number of European and Asian countries but I’ll manage. But you’ve got a bandwidth cap of 100 Gigabytes which, assuming the telcos didn’t do the proper math, is 100 000 Megabytes. So how fast would you reach that bandwidth cap if you used your consistent maximum speed? You’d have 44 444.44 seconds worth of high speed goodness before either your bill skyrocketed from exceeding your bandwidth quota or they’d simply disconnect your internet until the beginning of the month. 44 444 seconds might seem like a lot of seconds, until you remember that there are 3 600 seconds in an hour.

So how many hours of internet do they essentially provide you with, based on their figures and some basic calculations? Twelve. Twelve hours per month. They are offering you twelve glorious hours per month of use of your internet connection. How generous they are. This is a sham. To actually consider offering use of less than 2% of the time you’ve paid for is absurd. The worst part of this is that the figure I’ve come up with is a generous value. Rogers has a bandwidth cap of 90 GB on 18 Mbps and Bell has a cap of 100 GB on 16 Mbps. The graph of speed vs. bandwidth is asymptotic. (Well, actually the typical graph is asymptotic; Bell’s services all have a bandwidth cap with progressively lower caps as your speed decreases.) This doesn’t need to be. If they invested the profits, even only a fraction of the profits, they reap from their internet services, the telcos could bolster their infrastructures and easily support considerably higher usage with better speeds and more consistent connections. But they swallow the money and throw the cost of infrastructure improvement into newer more expensive plans.