Download downturn

>> Sympatico price hike will put new limits on your Internet use, not to mention your piracy

by MICHAEL CITROME

If you’re a download-addled mouse junkie, sit up and take notice—your freewheeling days of filling your hard drive with illicit music, video and software, not to mention hardcore porn, may be coming to an expensive end.
As of July, subscribers of Sympatico High Speed edition, the first and only over-the-phone high-speed Internet service available to most Montrealers, will have to deal with some changes. The 671,000 Sympatico HSE users in Quebec and Ontario are going to see their monthly fees increase to $44.95. But that’s not the bad news. They’ll also be getting less bang for their buck.

Since not long after Sympatico HSE launched around Christmas of 1998, the fee structure has been flat rate—that means no matter how much time you spend on the Net, or how much you download, everyone pays the same price. But beginning in July, only the first five gigabytes of upload and five gigabytes of download are included in the increased price. After that, you’ll be charged $7.95 for each additional gigabyte.

“It’s just a realization that there’s different levels of use out there,” says Sympatico PR man Andrew Cole. “Most customers will not be affected.”

Meanwhile, competitor Vidéotron has always had a six-gigabyte download and one-gigabyte upload cap on their cable Internet service. Says Vidéotron’s Jean-Paul Graneault: “This is to control our network and give the best high-speed service to everyone. About three per cent of users exceed six gigabytes. Quite often this is small businesses and they are charged like a residential customer. Or it’s very big users of mp3s and video movies.” Vidéotron charges two cents for each megabytes over six gigabytes, or about $20 per gig.

The math

A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes (though, for reasons unknown, Sympatico measures one gigabyte as 1000 megabytes). That’s about a fifth of a DVD, 1.6 CDs or nearly nine Zip disks. Many new computers ship with a 60 gigabyte hard drive installed. Five gigabytes, used over the course of a month, is eight CD-ROMs full of MP3s, video game ROMs or Seinfeld episodes. It’s also about eight movies in the popular DiVX format, and if you watch a daily half hour of Internet porn in decent quality video, that’s nearly a gigabyte by the end of the week. And you wouldn’t be unusual: studies show Canadians are among the biggest watchers of Internet porn, due no doubt in part to our ready access to cheap high-speed Internet access. As well, having your own Web cam, or obsessively watching someone else’s, is also a major bandwidth hog.

So it’s possible to blaze through five gigabytes yourself—but let’s take other people into account. If you’re among the millions of people who use peer-to-peer file trading—services like AudioGalaxy or Morpheus—then you’re not just downloading music, you’re sharing it. That’s the “to-peer” aspect of the deal.

So if you have a hard drive full of hot songs, and you go to bed or go to work and leave the program running, some file leeches could easily have consumed half a gigabyte of your precious bandwidth within eight hours.

Of course, p2p file trading is no longer limited to MP3s. Video, including entire seasons of the Simpsons, movies like Spider-Man and lots of porn can be had as well.
Plus, if you share your connection with your family or roommates over a Local Area Network, multiply your personal bandwidth use by the number of people on your LAN. Although Sympatico claims to encourage home networking, things are starting to look expensive.

A moral dilemma

Putting an expensive cap on high-speed Internet service goes against the plans of the federal government. The National Broadband Task Force seeks to put high-speed Internet access in every Canadian community by 2004. Naturally, they also want to encourage its use.

One of the main benefits of fast Internet is high-quality video, which is a major bandwidth hog, using between four and 10 megabytes per minute. For poor communities, this would get very expensive under Sympatico’s fee structure. It’s like getting cable TV and being charged an extra fee if you watch more than five hours a day.

As well, Sympatico could be seen as profiting from piracy. The majority of big downloads are illicit—pirated software, pirated movies, pirated music. So by metering out bandwidth, Sympatico’s collecting the toll, not the copyright owners.

Many Sympatico HSE members may not even know this change is going into effect. The e-mail was sent out to users’ @sympatico.ca mailbox, which some people, preferring yahoo or hotmail, don’t use. When the hike occurs, Sympatico will warn you once you reach four gigabytes—before that, you’ll have to check yourself on a Web site, which at presstime was not yet functioning. Internet users with deeper pockets can pay upwards of $70 a month for a faster Sympatico service that gives more gigabytes, but no matter what, you’ll be paying out if you go over. :