Shaw, a Canadian ISP that has a broadband cap of 250 GB per month for its fastest tier, said this week that its online video service would be exempt from data caps. Such a move places Shaw’s upcoming Movie Club service at an advantage to a competitive movie streaming service such as Netflix which is already having to downgrade its default service in Canada because of bandwidth caps.
The move would be akin to Comcast exempting customers of its Xfinity service from its data cap (it doesn’t), something that would raise the ire of regulators and consumers here, much as Shaw’s move could do in Canada. Shaw’s plans came out in a two-week long hearing of Canada’s Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) decision to let wholesale broadband providers charge their customers new rates. We covered some of the fallout from that decision, and the hearings themselves are providing pages of transcripts providing a critical look at how download limits and anticompetitive tactics from ISPs can hurt consumers and innovation. Maybe we could get those going here in the U.S.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Rick Harris.
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