Check your phone bill

Wednesday March 3, 2010

By Yukon News

Re Confronting unfair and unequal treatment of internet users in the Yukon:

Why is it that we Yukoners (and other Northwestel and Northwestel cable-serviced northern residents), pay extra for internet usage?

Do you download from the internet or use Skype? Are you paying extra for this? As the Yukon’s only internet service provider, Northwestel has given us the option of three different levels of internet service. You can either pay a monthly fee of $39.95, $59.95 or $79.95 for home internet or pay a much higher monthly fee for using internet in businesses - $99.95 or $159.95 per month.

These high monthly fees come with limited internet use. Yes, you heard that correctly, limited. Did you know that?

In many parts of this country Canadians have unlimited internet access for only $29.99 or $39.99 or less per month, so why not in the North? Are we being treated unequally?

Check your phone bill to see if you have been charged for over-usage. You can find this on the front page of your phone bill under your ‘one time charges.’ Friends of mine have received internet over-usage charges of more than $600 in the course of one month.

As if that is not enough, this over-usage charge is billed about six weeks after the fact. So if you see it on your bill, you are already too late to correct your internet behaviour, as the next bill is in the making.

Why are we paying so much more? Ask Northwestel and they will tell you it is all to do with distance, keeping lines maintained and not enough people living in the North. I can understand that living in the North comes at a higher cost in many respects, but some of the bills I have seen are outrageous.

So what are we to do? Where to start? I contacted Northwestel, but they are unable to provide details on the over-usage charges. They cannot tell me which websites I would have visited that caused the bill to be so high. All Northwestel can tell me is that I downloaded a certain number of megabytes over the limit or that someone might be stealing my wireless signal.

I called the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and they told me that internet service is not regulated. They also told me that Northwestel has a cost-recovery problem. (Perhaps Northwestel is trying to recover those costs by charging unassuming customers high over-usage fees?)

CRTC recommended that I meet with our MP to discuss this over-usage fee. And that is exactly what my intentions are, but I would like to hear from you first. Please send me your experiences with over-usage internet charges from Northwestel. With your support I truly hope that talking to our MP will get us somewhere.

Carla Mangnus

Whitehorse

(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Bookmark and Share 9 Comments

11:28am 03/18/10  |  abur6656 wrote:

If you are unfortunate enough to have been a victim of stolen signals, I apologize; it’s your neighbors who should pay!

11:27am 03/18/10  |  abur6656 wrote:

For the record, it takes a TON of downloading to rack up $600 in overages, so maybe people should stop doing so much illegal downloading?  Someone has to pay for all the usage going on, whether it is NorthwesTel or the people using the service, in my opinion, if you’re breaking the law, you should pay!  Lets be honest here, nothing is free, you pay for the service you get, don’t like it? Don’t use it!

11:24am 03/18/10  |  abur6656 wrote:

I’m not sure where in this article it says that NWTel monitors every web site you go to?  As an employee, I can tell you that is false.  I’ve had customers call in, who’ve had their signals stolen by neighbors, ask me if I could see that sort information, I was unable to help them.  I have had customers with overages and it’s not very often that people end up with $600 in overages; generally they have a $600 bill because yes, they had overages, but also didn’t pay their bill for some time

5:09pm 03/12/10  |  EricB wrote:

I was one of the first internet users in the Yukon and my first password assigned to me was 11thman. I was also on of the first to sign up for high speed with NWTel and the package was for unlimited Mb per month with no limit.  Northwestel decided that this was not going to make enough money so the put the limit on after a year so. The limit of 10000 Mb may have been acequate 7 years ago but not now with video…

12:26pm 03/10/10  |  riptide wrote:

Why is my gas/milk, etc more than down south? You can’t compare the costs of things down south to up north. But if you like it so much, feel free to move at any time.

If your friends did in fact receive a $600 bill for overage charges then they (or someone using their connection) downloaded a ton of stuff. Last time I downloaded a bunch of songs, I paid $10/GB. $600=60GBs… which is a lot - like around 15,000 songs.

8:51pm 03/09/10  |  C wrote:

What package do they have? I get by fine with 60GB/mo. As stated below, if you check your usage with their website, or use geektool on a mac ( eg. http://i40.tinypic.com/2nbvcoz.png ) you shouldn’t have a problem staying within the limit. I do agree that they are pricey though, and could stand for an unlimited package raspberry.

8:31pm 03/09/10  |  GuardaDelNorte wrote:

If you want to find out where all your bandwidth is going, I recommend using a re-flashed WRT54G, or a software-based firewall.  If you want more information on either of these options, please feel free to contact me at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

8:31pm 03/09/10  |  GuardaDelNorte wrote:

Also, for them to be monitoring every website you go to, they have to use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) which often involves capturing and sometimes storing every bit and byte going to and from your computer, which adds up to a lot of data over a month-long period, especially if they do it for every single user.

8:30pm 03/09/10  |  GuardaDelNorte wrote:

As a computer tech, I can tell you that for Northwestel to be able to tell you what website you were visiting when you went over your limit, they either have to be actively monitoring or capturing/redirecting all of your web traffic.  Redirecting is fairly common, but is not used at a number of ISPs because some users complain that this gives the ISP too much information about the browsing habits of individual users.

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