Canadian Cable Company Shaw Increases Bandwidth Caps

DSLReports reports that Canadian cable company Shaw has increased caps for customers and introduced unlimited plans, reversing a move towards caps that would limit customer use of Netflix streaming.

The important news is that it appears that Shaw has eased off of the caps slightly, and is giving users two different options for data.

Option one: users can stick to Shaw's existing speed tiers and pricing, but will immediately see considerably higher caps. Shaw Lite 1 Mbps customers will see their cap raised from 15GB a month to 30 GB a month, Shaw 7.5 Mbps standard customers will see their cap raised from 60 GB to 125 GB a month, and Shaw Extreme customers will see their cap raised from 150 GB to 250 GB a month.

Option Two is more interesting, and shows that Shaw may have been listening to customer complaints after all. Starting in June Shaw will begin offering users 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps and even 250 Mbps tiers featuring much higher caps (see right). In July, Shaw will also start offering 250 Mbps down, 15 Mbps up tiers with caps as high as 1 TB. The company will also offer some unlimited tiers, albeit only at speeds of 1 Mbps or 250 Mbps. 

With this second option, users are bumped to the next highest price/speed tier should they go over their usage allotment. 

via NewTeeVee.

Comments

[Johnson1965Tony]

We're missing the most important part about this and that's the pricing changes for each of these packages.

[gir]

I think 150-250 is okay for now, as long as there is an affordable way for a customer to get more if desired.

The important thing that never seems to get mentioned is that caps need to increase over time. I really expect that companies will impose these caps, then (try to) keep them the same for 10 years.