Digital Home Thoughts: Bell gets Cheaper and More Expensive

"Users in our Bell Canada forums note that the Canadian incumbent telco has lowered the monthly rate of several of their tiers, but they've countered that by lowering customer usage caps as well. A look at the Bell website reveals that the company lowered usage limits on all their tiers, in addition to raising the overage cap penalty limit (at $1 per gigabyte) an additional $20, to $80 per month in maxiumum usage penalties."

Bell Canada recently made the news that it would no longer apply throttling to its customers later this year. Well, the other shoe has dropped and it seems that with this change comes some pricing changes. The ISP has dropped prices, but also lowered limits on its packages. Go over your data cap and get slapped with a fine. I cannot say this is not wholly unexpected. I would think this is a rather transparent attempt to draw more money from its customers as the Internet replaces other services. The part that makes me wonder is while connection speeds are going up, it is suspicious that the data limits are not increasing appropriately, and are even shrinking. Personally, I would rather have a larger data cap with the same speed, than some of the faster speeds offered. What about you?