Thursday, February 10, 2011

On Shaw and their UBB absurdity

Purchasing Shaw "HD with digital basic" is $36.95/month. Adding "Movie central" costs $17.00/month, and comes with unlimited on demand HDTV.

Assume a fairly aggressive compression and that the HD video srteam is 10mbps. That means for $53.95 a month I can transfer 25920000megs, or 24.7 terabytes over shaw's infrastructure.

If I were to do the same using their internet service, buying their Nitro package for $160.00/month would give me a limit of 360GB/month. That would put me over my limit by 24942.8 GB. At shaw's $1/gig overage charges (I was quoted this by a shaw representative) my monthly bill would be $160.00 + $24942.80 = $25102.80.

$53.95/month vs $25102.80/month. Anti-competitive much?

That's an extreme. Here's a more resonable scenario. Say a family watched 2hrs/day of on demand content. Again, at the conservative estimate of 10mbps for HD video, that's 2.05TB of data they pull down across the shaw netowrk a month.

This works out to $53.95/month vs $1739.2/month.

So shaw, are you going to start penalizing the "heavy users" of your TV on-demand service as well?

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