Oh Canada, Bandwidth is Expensive – Eh?
Posted by Marketing
Recently a customer brought it to our attention that unlimited bandwidth pricing in Canada is up to 90 times more expensive than other countries.
“Despite Canadians ranking 33rd in broadband Internet speeds worldwide (speedtest.net), Canadian carriers cry foul; their networks are congested and unable to cope with the sheer volume of data that Canadians are consuming,” says the writer, Chris Stavropoulos.
In Japan, England, and the U.S, carriers provide account options for unlimited bandwidth. In Canada, there may be a standard rate for usage of 300 GB per month, with a per-GB charge for overage – an example of usage-based billing. Some Canadian DSL providers cap their overage fees, others do not. The article states cable internet providers are expected to adopt this same usage-based pricing model sometime this year.
In Africa, bandwidth prices remain high because of the expense of deploying necessary infrastructure (satellite versus Fibre optics), complicated and bureaucratic licensing policies, and profiteering.
For data-heavy operations like EMC SRDF, Celerra/Centera, NetApp SnapMirror, Symantec Volume Replicator, Dell EqualLogic, Veeam Backup & Replication, standard file sharing protocols like File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and many others, usage-based billing would quickly add up.
WAN optimization cuts bandwidth costs and resource consumption with minimal effort. Global users can reduce infrastructure costs and alleviate bandwidth constraints without sacrificing service quality, reliability or performance. For some service providers, savings are in the millions of dollars.
Compression is another way to significantly increase effective data throughput and save on overage costs. Compression ratios depend on the type of data that is being compressed. Production results have demonstrated a range of 2:1 up to 15:1. HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance compresses data blocks (versus TCP packets) and efficiently aggregates data into blocks, before moving over the WAN. This puts more data into the HyperIP accelerated WAN. HyperIP’s block level compression feature is very effective, even at speeds up to OC3 (155 Mbps).
Since HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance increases effective data throughput 3 to 10 times, organizations can get increased performance without increasing their usage of bandwidth. Simply put, it takes less bandwidth to replicate data with HyperIP than without it. Even in Canada.
