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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

There is a reason why lots of technical people from Canada seek to find their fortune in the United States.

This situation really sucks, but remember that those of us with Telus or Shaw don't have anything to complain about at the moment so you aren't hearing about all of us on 10-25 mbps lines, with 50-200 GB soft caps that aren't enforced. I'm torrenting up a storm 24/7, and regularly download shows and movies on iTunes and Netflix, stream Grooveshark at home and on my phone. I don't even hear anything if I use 2x my monthly data transfer. Our upstream bandwidth is still terrible though :/

I don't envy the US at all, I envy Sweden, Japan, South Korea. No offence but I'd sooner move to many places before the USA.

Don't get me wrong, the CRTC is worse than useless actively harming the tech landscape. We have zero competition with Internet and phone pricing at all, the big guys basically just fix prices because it's more profitable for them to collude than compete. We have a lot of major problems.

Shaw is cable right?

Yep.

Yes

They also operate their own internet backbone and sell access to corporate clients.

It may be just a matter of time before they follow suit. Who knows, it surely would not be a surprise.

This isn't accurate. Shaw has recently jumped on the same bandwagon and started enforcing hard caps with overage fees. Just go here if you want to check that:

http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/High-Spee...

($2.00/GB for each GB used above plan’s limit)

AFAIK, Telus isn't doing yet, but I've heard that this is a technical limitation rather than lack of desire to do so.

Have you actually gotten a bill from them yet? My bill is the same $47/mo it's been for a while. I don't have a tv.

I have. They are enforcing it now.

Where are you located?

Edmonton. They started reporting bandwidth usage on last month's bill.

Interesting. (Terrifying). Canada is now a third world country. Way to go CRTC.

Is the US really much better? As we saw earlier in the week from Netflix, slower average bandwidth than Canada... hardly any competition and so on.

If you want decent internet connectivity, move to Europe or Japan or something. They're rolling out 100mbps broadband in the UK.

"They're rolling out 100mbps broadband in the UK."

Not quite yet. http://www.eclipse.net.uk/fibre-broadband/what-is-fttc-

http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/up-to-100mb.html

Some already have it. (My brother for one)

Schedule of when areas will get it from Virgin: (Other providers may be different).

http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf/100Mb-r...

Thanks, I'd not heard about this (only been back here for just over a month).

This is excellent news, most places covered by the end of this year. Sadly Bristol is lacking!

That graph was a useless piece of shit. I have a feeling there's a bimodal distribution there, but can't even get a feeling for it because the graph was so poorly made.

Seriously, a mean without a standard deviation? That's a failing grade in a first year statistics course.

Fair enough, but my anecdotal evidence suggests broadband in the US is nothing to be proud of by any means.

I find myself pretty comfortable with 25/25 in rural Maryland. I could up it to 150/35 if I wanted.

Canadian expat working in the US here. The situation in Canada continues to get worse, and was always behind even the relatively pokey US internet providers.

It isn't necessarily about the size of the pipe, but rather unnecessary restrictions that negatively impact the way people use the internet. Here I'm on Comcast and have a fairy generous cap (250GB). If people start penny-pinching what they do with their bandwidth it will be the end of web-based industries as we know it.

More accurately for Canada - it never began. Folks like myself who specialize in web-related development, either frontend or backend, basically have no future in our home countries.

I hate to be so down about my own country, but it's the damned truth, though many Canadian developers are too proud to admit it. The software industry in Canada is anemic, grossly underpaid, and that goes doubly for anything web-related.

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