Bell Canada (NYSE: BCE) is once again up to its usage-based billing ways by lowering the amount of bandwidth users can consume on their broadband service package.
Although it appeared to take some of the sting out by lowering the monthly cost of its speed tiers, it's of little help that Bell Canada lowered usage limits and raised the overage cap penalty limit ($1 per gigabyte) up CAD 20 (USD 19.74) to CAD 80 (USD 78.99) per month.
The service lowered the usage caps on its four Fiber to the Node (FTTN)-based Fibe tiers: its Fibe 10 service cap was lowered from 75 GB to 60 GB, Fibe 12 has gone from 50 GB to 40 GB, Fibe 16 dropped from 75 GB to 65 GB and Fibe 25 went from 125 GB to 100 GB.
Not surprisingly, users in DSL Reports' forum aren't thrilled about the new limits.
"If they drop my package from 75 GB to 60 GB, then they better have a really good offer for me, or this might finally convince this 10+ year customer here to move elsewhere," the user said. "I had been staying with them recently mostly because of the inconvenience of switching. If my bill is going to increase by another 10-20$/month due to that change, I'm gone."
For more:
- DSL Reports has this article
Special report: Year in review 2011: The stories that dominated the wireline industry
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