Month: April 2008

If you haven’t been following the drama and the outcry surrounding BendBroadband’s latest pricing changes, let me sum up what’s been going on the last few weeks:

• BendBroadband announced they were going give you more speed, but they were going to cap the bandwidth. Needless to say, this caused quite the outrage, and that post now has 100 comments (and counting), many from BendBroadband representatives. Their response to the outcry was to create a new platinum plan with lower speed, but a higher cap. A calculation spreadsheet was also posted so folks could really see how expensive this could get. BendTel was also featured in the local paper, and made a few subtle jabs at BendBroadband.
• A couple weeks later, the story made national news with it hitting Gizmodo where it then hit the digg front page, as well as a bunch of other sites (you can digg my original post here).

It’s been a week or so since this thing hit the wire on a larger scale, and my sources at BendBroadband say they are watching the conversations here and are listening. They will not say, however, if anything will change, but they are listening (still waiting for the new business plans to come out, folks).

One of my original gripes (one that was putting my bandwidth consumption over the edge of some of the tiers) was that middle-of-the-night consumption shouldn’t count the same. But something that was pointed out to me privately was a point I didn’t think of that makes a bit of sense: The Net Neutrality advocates say that it’s basically an all-or-nothing thing when it comes to bandwidth counting — you can’t consider nighttime data from daytime data (even though that’s what the power company does). So you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

A couple protest sites have been created since this all started brewing. One is FixBBB.com, which has been trying to organize a public protest and get more media attention to this cap. They also make a suggestion as to who you can switch to, but I’d recommend avoiding Clearwire and use somebody like Yellowknife or Webformix instead if you’re looking for wireless rural Internet. BendTel also provides DSL, but primarily to Business customers.

Another protest site has hit the wire, being run off a BendBroadband home connection (which is bound to push usage up a bit, considering the site’s received a few diggs). According to the site, the guy had 214GB of data transfer last month and 15GB between April 10 and 15. Even if he was on the platinum plan, he’d owe nearly $240 last month.

Since I don’t have the foggiest idea if BendBroadband will shut his site down for terms-of-service violations, here’s the screenshot off his site:

So it all comes down to this: Knowing what you know, if you’re using a BendBroadband connection, what are your plans? Are you moving or are you staying? If you’re moving, where to? I’m still exploring my options, and will reveal my decision at a later date, but I wanted to see what everybody else was doing as well.

Update on 4/17: Welcome Bulletin readers. All the relevant posts with all the discussions are linked above. I haven’t had time to read the article yet, but will comment here when I have a chance to do so.