It seems that Bell Canada is following the leader in regards to monitoring traffic and setting download caps. Bell will be switching to a tiered based pay system according to this article in the Globe and Mail, as well as instituting download limits sometime beginning in June. This new system will affect approximately 850,000 subscribers, a significant portion of broadband subscribers in Canada.

The Globe and Mail originally received leaked information, but has confirmed the planned changes with a Sympatico representative, who stated that Sympatico calculates that 92 per cent of its subscribers use about 1.5 gigabytes of data per month, leaving a cushion of 3.5GB before users have to start paying extra. According to the representative "the personalized pricing model will ensure that customers have sufficient bandwidth to meet their on-line needs and allow Bell Sympatico, as Canada's leading ISP, to continue modernizing our network to address consumers' growing requirements for more speed and additional on-line services."

There will be three new speed and price points, with a low speed/low cost package and "uber-user" solution being the new offerings. The highest of the newly proposed packages, dubbed "Sympatico High Speed Ultra", a 3 Mbps down and 640 Kbps up package, will cost $69.95 per month, and will have a download and upload cap of 10 gigabytes per month.

The next lowest level of service will essentially be a redressed version of their standard service already offered, priced at $44.95 per month, with 5 GB downstream and 5 GB upstream caps set in place. The lowest "tier" will be dubbed "Sympatico DSL Basic", and will offer speeds of 128Kbps for $29.95 per month with a 1GB cap in place. Customers passing these caps on any of the three newly proposed service tiers will be charged $0.79 for every additional 100 MB of data either downloaded or uploaded.

Caps may not be a big deal to the standard user who plans to simply check TV listings and e-mail their cousin in California, but to serious internet users they act as a significant damper to the freedom most users have grown accustomed to. Still, even experienced users may not be aware of just how much bandwidth they consume monthly and how close to these caps they will come. Bob Carrick, a mod in our Sympatico forum, has drafted a clear usage chart that shows how easily one can burn through that much data.

User opinion of course isn't favorable toward some of the shifts, with one petition quickly filled with a list of almost four thousand names irritated by the transition. Most of the complaints center around the creation of the 5 gigabyte download cap placed on Sympatico's standard service, with many users believing 10 gigabytes to be a far more reasonable target. For those of you eye-balling Canadian DSL customers and thinking this doesn't affect you: take a good look at what will most likely be your broadband future. These are exactly the type of pricing plans that should be rolling into your town over the next several years.