If you had asked me a few days ago, how much I download and upload each day, I’d have had no idea. Apparently some cable companies in the USA are testing metered internet service.
I haven’t seen this mentioned for Canadian companies, but if it works in Texas, it will probably arrive here soon enough. If you know your current usage, you’ll be able to select the best plan for your needs.
To measure your daily transfer rates, you can download the free utility, NetMeter. I installed it last week, which went very smoothly. The icon sits in the system tray, and you can click on it to see a graph of your current usage.
Right-click on the system tray icon, to change the options, or to view your totals and projected totals.
You can also view Daily, Weekly and Monthly reports, and export them as csv files. Open the exported files in Excel, and you can create your own chart, reports and pivot tables from the data.
Oh and a quick mention that using a desktop rate monitor isn’t great if you have more than one computer. Our ISP http://www.ttllp.co.uk/phone (aff) has a control panel that lets you see what the ISP thinks the usage is – after all, that’s what matters.
Tim, I remember paying by the minute, and trying to get things done as quickly as possible, so we didn’t use up all our monthly allocation. And I hope you’re right about capped plans, for Canada too.
MJ Ray, good point about monitoring one computer. This just gives me an idea about the use on the main machine. I’d want to see the ISP reading if I had a capped plan.
MJ Ray, those “hidden caps” are in full effect in the US. Comcast won’t reveal what their caps are (apparently quite generous, though) and they may be variable. As far as I can tell, you’d pretty much have to be downloading a ton DVD’s each month to be affected. From what I’ve heard, they will send a warning letter and then cancel your account if you don’t reduce usage. This is certainly a cap, but only the very worst offenders are affected. Anyway, bandwidth is relatively cheap to add on. Certainly cheaper than having a high customer churn rate, and subscriber acquisition costs are quite high. That’s why I don’t think that any caps that are imposed (if any) will be a problem for most users.