| VIF Internet Montreal I have the 5Mb/s down, 800Kb/s up service
with the 100GB monthly softcap.
Subscriber for 5th consecutive year.
Its about $1/day. Speed shown on »bell.ca/speedcheckup is
about 4200 Kilobits/second download,
and 660 Kilobits/second upload. 
I consider myself very fortunate to get a good value for
a very low cost of $1/day (yearly contract renewal).
My American friends in North Denver pay $86/month
just to obtain 1544 Kb/s (bi-directional symmetrical speed 
My Swiss pals pay enormous fees of equivalent to $100cdn
just to have the same ADSL 5Mb/s service.
My friends in France pay more. In Euros.
VIF Internet does not charge for the GSTax (as yet)
because they supply Internet service across a provincial
border [harmonized tax is coming to Canada soon 
Actual speeds are typical for BELL ADSL STANDARD service
on aerial twisted pair re-cabled in 1978.
The old wire insulation is broken,
and during rain and wet snow,
ADSL rates can drop to 50% of dry day speeds.
Speeds are also affected by temperature dropping
below -10C, and this cuts speeds by 25% of
Spring and Summer rates. I have one server that has
collected statistics from 2006.
The wet loop distance to the Remote DSLAM feed
is only 1200m (about 4000 feet). I know where the cabinet
is located, and where the cable runs are.
VIF is actually NOT the provider,
rather they re-sell the BELL DSL service.
The softcap policy was put into practice in 2007,
after a series of abuses,
and subscribers are moved to slower (20% of normal, or less)
throttle-policed router domain.
I use my service with many Computers connected,
and one CPU has been measuring upTime since 2006,
and the uptime of the IP has been near 80%;
sometimes server outages occur.
I have been connected to the "Internet"
from before it became a service around 1994 in Ottawa,
in various Telecommunications Research labs.
The Internet started with 5 basic services
of which Hypertext was only one part,
and the least significant in my opinion.
FTP and IRC were more important at the time,
and prior to that,
FidoMAIL and the BBS'es.
I am sad to see that NNTP-USENET service discontinued at VIF,
but to the credit of VIF, for that company carried it for a long time,
as a legacy service. Modern Web sites are much better as replacements
for all aspects of the older protocols and methods.
New VoIP Phone replacement seems to be popular now,
but the service still has outages such as the brief service outage on 5-OCT-2009.
VoIP is not a replacement for a landline and E911 are challenged by the adoption of VoIP.
Long Distance in our country, coupled with relatively HIGH wireless toll rates have boosted the churn to VoIP service,
with incredibly low prices for National and even International calls.
Rogers and Shaw and CogeCo seem to making some market share gains using DOCSIS3 cable methods
at very high speeds in our area. I visited another ex-Bell Canada ExperTech Employee,
and witnessed testing of 11Mb/s continual payload at a peak traffic hour.
He has a triple-play setup with Cable, IPTV and VoIP setup and it was impressive
but the costs still top out at $147cdn (with added Mobile CellPhone).
I wrote this essay because several previous essays were negative,
especially on the "softcap" policy. I admit that I was also concerned
when I read of the policy change.
100 gigabytes seems like such a very large limit,
and the rationale given by Management to a local Montreal Technical Newsletter seemed sound;
some subscribers were using torrent clients 24/7 and affecting the aggregate bandwidth requirements.
Other small and medium sized providers are moving to limit consumption.
I use the torrent system to obtain Linux distros and technical data (its quicker that FTP).
The customer service response is excellent.
The DSL is a re-sell of Bell, and 611 Technical support is good.
The price is one the lowest for the 5Meg service offered, but will not stay low for long.
We do less than 5GB in some months but my Teen is slowly driving the upper edge of usage to 50GB.
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