Are Costa Rica’s Internet Service Providers Going to Be Charging Extra for Excessive Bandwidth?

In the last couple of weeks one of our accounts has been having a hard time logging into their server. So after they rebooted the router a few times and then cleaned the ends of the cables the problem still existed. For a while it was driving me a bit crazy why this was happening until suddenly that light bulb clicked on; I remembered the article I wrote back in April, 2010,  Net Neutrality For Costa Rica – Throttling Bandwidth Usages and Charging For It.

A Free Trade Agreement signed with the US and Canada (a few years back) ensured that private companies are able to operate in the telecoms sector. State-owned ISP, Radiográfica Costarricense (RACSA) has already formed alliances with the main cable operators to allow them to provide broadband services and ICE has been working feverishly to upgrade their system.  Since then, the competition has been going hog wild running fiber optic just about everywhere, which leads one to ask two big questions:

• Are some of Costa Rica Internet Service Providers (ISP) starting to throttle bandwidth to save money?
• And could this be the first sign that these companies may start charging their customers for excessive and/or limit bandwidth as we wrote about back in April, 2010?

To add a bit of inside, web hosting providers are charged a certain amount per month or per year for an allocated amount of bandwidth from backbone providers and wholesale data centers. That cost is then passed on to the consumer in the form of web hosting plans, which vary in cost from a few dollars a month to X amount of bandwidth and storage, to unlimited bandwidth, to dedicated servers. Now, if you exceeded the maximum bandwidth available to you each month, you most likely will be shut down.

Bandwidth is expensive, and it varies from $100 to $200 a terabyte. One Terabyte equals 1000 Gigabytes.  Example: Google App Engine charges around $130 per 1-terabyte of usage. To put this in laymen’s terms,  streaming a 2/hour, 3-D HD movie uses between 250-300gigs of bandwidth. Viewing a 30 minute TV show uses between 400-600megs. You might say, “No big deal” but it adds up very quickly in today’s internet age and even more if you are sharing bandwidth.

However, this is where the ploy comes in and it gets a deceitful when some web hosting companies claim when you sign up on their Unlimited Bandwidth Hosting plan, when in reality you do not!

The major culprit is US Comcast, whose customers have been no stranger to bandwidth shenanigans over the years, from the whole torrent filtering mess to when they imposed a  250GB monthly cap. You now see how their customers could be shut down after viewing one 3-D movie or, unless they start paying extra for over-exceeding their bandwidth allotment.

Comcast perfected Bandwidth Throttling, and now the company is back with a new data throttling scheme intended to put the kibosh on excessive traffic during those times when the network is already being overwhelmed.  Costa Rican’s are starting to experience this everyday when they get the infamous error/throttling report, “Can’t Located Server” or “Sorry The Connection Timed Out.”

As Costa Rican’s demand for high tech service increases, so may the  IPSs  be following in the footsteps of Comcast.  So even if you are paying for UNLIMITED Bandwidth, obviously it does not mean you are getting it.

But this is not limited to IPS; players in the mobile device have joined in. Verizon started throttling bandwidth back in Feb, 2011 to their Smartphone customers who use to much bandwidth.  Others started throttling data on the new iPhones, which ICE has the monopoly on.

Hummm, now what does that tell you?

To put it bluntly, should you run afoul of these Bandwidth wardens, expect to find yourself down-throttled for an X amount of time, or your service terminated or until your average bandwidth utilization rate drops below X amount or more likely, getting hit with an excessive bandwidth bill.

Exceeding bandwidth is very easy to do when one  streams videos from places like Netflix and some of the free movies websites like, Hula, which a lot of Costa Rican’s do.

With Costa Rica becoming more technology advance, expect more problems and maybe a surprise on your bill or like I suspected with one of our account, you find yourself not being able to view and/or log into your website as throttling is applied.

Another problem that faces Costa Rican’s was the building boom in the early 2000s,  where developers,  sales hyped that they have internet service for apartment complexes, business centers and private communities. When in reality, the residences and business are ONLY sharing bandwidth from a single line. Costa Rican’s, business owners and expats may find themselves not being able to view the internet when they hit these bandwidth limits much faster and easier.

But all is not lost, and the good news; Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Network neutrality is a principle that advocates no restrictions by Internet service providers or governments on consumers’ access to networks that participate in the internet.

Specifically, network neutrality would prevent restrictions on content, sites, platforms, types of equipment that may be attached, and modes of communication. Google also wants to an alarm consumers with tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs.

What Bandwidth Caps Would Mean To Costa Rica
The two largest ISPs in the US, AT&T and Comcast, have already imposed bandwidth caps on their subscribers, and companies like Time Warner are toying with the idea of metering, so the days of all-you-can-get Internet could be coming to an end. Costa Rica is no different, in fact it may be worse because the government does have the ability to downsize usages, and take steps to not only regulate usage, but to charge customers for exceeding the usage.

If they follow in Canada’s regulatory agency that last year authorized usage-based billing, what used to be 200-GB or unlimited Internet service plans suddenly became limited to ONLY 25 GB per month. If you exceed the allotment, you will pay $2 a gig (1000 colons) – that’s $7 or 3500 Colons just for downloading one (non HD) 2 hour movie.

And if you are into watching videos on places like youTube, or Hula,  you could reach your cap in a very short time.

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