Digital Home Thoughts: Shaw Communications Ups Internet Transfer Caps, Lays Out Plan for Big Speed Boost

"Today we are excited to share our new direction on Internet pricing and packaging with you, our customers. With your help, we've created a model that we hope you'll agree is fair, flexible and offers a variety of options for customers today and into the future. We'd like to thank the hundreds of customers who took time to come out to the 34 sessions and those who shared their ideas online. Many of those who participated are the technology innovators who told us they wanted an Internet experience that worked not only today, but for the needs of tomorrow. We also heard that our customers wanted transparency, more choice of internet speed and data options, increased flexibility to meet their varied needs, and above all, fairness."

There's been a lot of noise here in Canada bout UBB (Usage-Based Billing), and as one of the big ISPs here in Canada, Shaw is right in the thick of this fight. Unlike, it seems, the rest of the major ISPs (Bell, Rogers, etc.) Shaw is actively seeking out feedback from their customers and have come up with some interesting results.

Effective immediately, they've doubled - or more than doubled - the data transfer caps that were in place. I'm a Shaw customer myself, and they've never seemed to care much about data caps in the past - I went over my limit three months in a row when I was re-uploading my data to a new online backup service after Mozy jacked my rates so high, and I never got hit with any extra fees. The fact that the real costs of each GB transferred to Shaw is around 3 cents goes a long way to explain why it's never been much of an issues - yet after the CRTC decision came down, it seems every big ISP decided it was time to rake in the profit.

But back to Shaw's changes: the plan I'm on went from 100 GB per month to 250 GB per month. That's pretty good - but it gets much, much more interesting later this year. Next month, the 25 Mbps down/2.5 Mbps up/250 GB package I'm one now becomes a 50 Mbps down/3 Mbps up/400 GB plan. $10 more per month bumps me to an impressive 100 Mbps down/5 Mbps up/500 GB plan. Things get crazy in the fall: that same $10 jump grants an impressive 10 Mbps upload speed. A higher end package offers 250 Mbps down/15 Mbps up/750 GB...wow!

Not everyone is going to be happy with these changes though: it looks like the entry-level package, now dubbed Unlimited Lite, will cost $59 per month - up significantly from the previous price point of $27. It offers unlimited data. yes, but at a glacial 1 Mbps down and 256 Kbps up. Speeds that slow would be OK if the price was $15, not $59. Shaw doesn't seem interested in going after low-income families who want Internet access, which is a shame - there's a market there, and I believe everyone should have access to some form of Internet access, even if it's a bit on the slow side.

I should point out that anyone who lives in a community with gigabit Internet (1000 Mbps) will chuckle at my excitement over the above speeds, but for the rest of us that don't have access to insane speeds like that, this is as good as it gets for now!