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All posts tagged "isp"


Thursday, April 7, 2011

The UBB Deception: Usage Based Billing in Canada Explained

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home News" @ 09:30 PM

This is one of more easier to understand videos when it comes to the issue of Usage Based Billing - UBB - and what it really means. I'm putting this on every site in the network because if you're in Canada, you need to understand what's happening (everyone else in the world might find it interesting). Now that one of the ISPs here in Canada has admitted that the pricing of their plans is not linked to actual use, the logic behind UBB start to become even more baffling. We know the motivation is money, but as a "small c capitalist" I believe there's room for plenty of profit while still being fair to your customers. The model of usage-based billing we use in society for buying clothes and food should be applied in the same way for a data connection. Read more...


Friday, July 30, 2010

Busting Bandwidth Bugaboos: Troubleshooting ISP Speed Problems

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 11:30 AM

Since most Thoughts Media readers are using high-speed Internet, I decided this article would benefit everyone, so it's one of our rare across-the-network pieces of content. I hope you find it useful!

Figure 1: What is this, 1994 all over again?

Whenever bandwidth is discussed, there's always lots of finger pointing because there are so many variables, and players involved, that it's rarely a simple issue. My particular bandwidth bugaboo this morning? I was ticked off that Dropbox (referral) was only uploading at 10 KB/s. I left a 900 MB transfer running all night and it wasn't finished in the morning, and that's when I discovered the awful speed. My first instinct was to point a finger at Dropbox, thinking there was some sort of bandwidth throttling going on. I did a speed test with a tool my ISP provides (speedtest.shaw.ca) and was shocked to see 1.7 Mbps downloads and 107 kbps uploads (Figure 1). It's normally 20x that on downloads and 10x that on uploads, so I knew something was wrong beyond just Dropbox. Read more...


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