Telus (TSX:T) is lowering its Internet broadband caps – but the company says customers are not likely to even notice a difference.
“The vast majority of our customers don’t come anywhere near the new thresholds,” said Telus spokesman Shawn Hall. “Even with these changes, we have the most generous Internet thresholds in the industry in Canada – in some cases twice as high other large ISPs.”
There is no change to the data caps offered to business customers, Hall said. The new caps apply only to residential customers.
Telus’ bare-bones Internet plan ($37 per month) allows for 150 gigabytes of usage per month. It will drop to 100 GB under the new caps.
High speed turbo ($47 per month), which has faster download speeds, will see caps drop from 250 GB to 150 GB. Turbo 25 ($57 per month) will drop from 500 to 250 GB.
At the beginning of this year, in its Technology, Media and Telecommunications predictions for 2012, Deloitte predicted more data caps in North America, as an explosion in movie streaming and online gaming gobbles up bandwidth.
Internet service providers are scrambling to keep up with the ever-increasing appetite for more bandwidth and faster download speeds.
In September, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said the data caps imposed by Canadian Internet service providers were “almost a human rights violation” – something of an irony, given that it is Netflix that is putting some of the greatest strain on Canadian ISPs.
Hall insists that, even with the new data caps, most Telus customers won’t come close to using up their quota. He said watching Netflix for an hour uses up about one GB of data.
“So even on our most popular mid-range plan, which is the Telus Internet 15, you’d have to watch 150 hours of Netflix in a month to start coming up against your threshold. So you’d essentially have to hold that down as a full-time job.”
Asked if there would be any overage charges for customers who exceed their bandwidth caps, Hall said “not at this time.”
“We don’t currently charge customers for overage, but what we do is encourage people who use more bandwidth than their plan allows to move to a larger plan.”
