My Unplugged Cable

The recent news of Shaw enforcing their bandwidth caps have a lot of people upset, including me. I have been contemplating a life without cable television and relying solely on Netflix, streaming from the websites of the network and downloading shows for a few months now.

This all meant that I would be consuming more bandwidth, and with Shaw’s decreased bandwidth caps and charges for exceeding those caps I had very few options.

For the last half of December and all of January I have been struggling with the question of what to do. On January 16 I decided to take my scraps of paper with costs, caps and act on it by calling Telus and Shaw. There were no surprises with the call to Telus. The numbers they provided me matched my calculations and my call to Shaw was of little help.

I was told that other companies will charge, regardless of what they say. This video says that Telus won’t enforce bandwidth caps and I really want to believe them, but there is some underlying emotion that makes me dread returning to Telus.

It’s a numbers game, and be it bandwidth or cost, the future is friendlier and cheaper with Telus. I will save $9 a month if I bundle my Internet and home phone services with Telus, but with Shaw’s 30 day notice to cancel services I can’t make the switch overnight and will continue to hum and haw over this while I figure out if it’s best for me.

If I stay I am subject to bandwidth caps and paying more per month, but with Telus their situation could change and they could decrease limits and start enforcing, leaving me with no where to go and being inconvenienced for nothing.

In the mean time, I cancelled television to pay for the cost of Netflix and Usenet memberships. We will still have OTA channels and whatever else is on farmer’s vision but soon the coax will be cold and then I will really see how much bandwidth I consume when it’s my sole provider of entertainment.