On this episode of Spark: Online Introverts, Designing for Solitude, and The Drama of Usage Based Billing. Click below to listen to the whole show, or download the MP3 (runs 54:00).
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Usage Based Billing – part 1
Usage Based Billing is a hot topic these days. The CRTC has decided to allow Bell and other big telecom companies to change the way Canadians are billed for internet access to a metering, or usage-based billing (UBB) system, where service providers can charge per byte in addition to their basic access charges. We spoke to Steve Anderson, the founder and National Coordinator of OpenMedia.ca, a group that’s put together a petition against UBB called “Stop The Meter”. We also spoke with Mirko Bibic from Bell Canada to hear their position. Mirko is the Senior Vice-president of Regulatory and Government Affairs at Bell. (Runs 16:10)
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Usage Based Billing – part 2
So we’ve explored both sides of the UBB coin – on one side consumers accusing big telecoms of using UBB as a cash-grab, and on the other, big telecoms saying there’s a strain on the networks and charging for bandwidth is necessary to run their business. It’s a battle we’ve seen before, something more akin to an economic stage play, at least according to our guest Markus Giesler, an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University. (Runs 7:10)
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The Merry Introverts of the Internet
Ever known someone who was shy and awkward in real life, but a veritable life of the party online? It’s called the “Online Disinhibition Effect” – where the anonymity of being online allows people to lose their inhibitions. It’s also why so many introverts we know are so darn extroverted online. Spark contributor Sandra Ferrari had a recent awakening about being a “Netrovert” and brings us her story. (Runs 8:28)
Play audio:
- Dr. Barbara Moses
- The Atlantic: Caring For Your Introvert
- What’s the word for ‘online-extrovert-offline-introvert’?
Designing for Solitude
On Spark, we’ve talked a lot about the importance of solitude in the midst of a connected world. You know, the idea of putting our devices away for a bit to “get away from it all”. But what if you did the opposite? What if there were tech tools that actually helped us achieve solitude? Nora speaks with Ben Fullerton, a director of user experience at Method Design in San Francisco, where they are thinking about these very questions from a design point of view. (Runs 9:33)
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A “Screwy” Situation
Recently the people at ifixit.com put up a provocative blog post and video titled “Apple’s Diabolical Plan to Screw Your iPhone”. It was all about a tiny little screw that is found on the iPhone4…a screw that they say is scarce. Nora speaks to Kyle Wiens, the co-founder and CEO of iFixit and the guy that wrote the original post to find out why this little screw has gotten DIY techies in a tizzy. We contacted Apple for their verification, but they “declined to comment”. (Runs 7:43)
Play audio:
- iFixit
- iFixit: Apple’s Diabolical Plan to Screw Your iPhone
- Full uncut version of interview with Kyle Wiens
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I wondered where the "explored both sides of the UBB coin" came from with the Markus Giesle interview. You of course didn't really do that, given you only interviewed an incumbent phone company (one of three broad types of providers) and a few consumers. There are more than two sides of this debate.
The UBB decision isn't about an ISP being able to charge their customers what they think they need to — something that wouldn't be anywhere near as controversial. It is about a business model choice being imposed by a government granted monopoly on all ISPs. To get at that you need to interview some of the independent ISPs who haven't been granted monopoly status by being granted right-of-way access to that "last mile" to our homes.
The congestion Bibic was talking about isn't on this "last mile" to our homes that the controversy is about (and where the UBB is being applied), but on an entirely different part of the network — in other words, he was misguiding you. The phone companies are relying on the fact most people (including the CRTC) don't know how the network works, or the government handouts and special policy considerations the legacy phone and cable companies have been given.
When you say "large ISPs", you are talking about monopoly phone and cable companies. They did not build the network on their own, but exist as an exception to property rights — that right-of-way to put wires above and below public and private property without needing permission from or payment to the property owners. They also built these networks largely on taxpayers expense.
The solution that many of us have is to separate the network into a public sector part (municipal distribution, a natural monopoly) and a private sector part (generation, ISP services, a natural free market), just like we did in Ontario for electricity. I offered details on that option in a presentation before the CRTC http://BillC32.ca/5096
This isn't a marketplace drama between producers and consumers — this is a political conflict between those who support government granted monopolies against those who believe there should be market competition.
I don't think usage based billing is going to result in a 'win' for the big ISPs…
Our household's current plan is to get rid of our cable and up our bandwidth. Our bill will equal out to be the less per month, but we will have faster downloads of all of our digital TV and movies with a much, much higher cap.
Your "household plan" under UBB rates will be about equal to the cost of cable + internet prior. And then grow more as the future rolls along. You need to realize how little you be sold for how much. They have realized we are canceling our Cable etc and watching online. Now they will balance it. They won't let you try and be clever and save that money I am afraid.
Enter text right here!
I love to break open stuff – it's a learning experience, especially when you have a goal in mind, say from replacing RAM in your laptop to even a simple watch battery. Through you learn alot about the inner working of a pc/device this way, the benefits are also economical.
My breaking point was when I was a First Year student at university with a 2 year old laptop. My hard drive was making the dreaded "Click of death" and I was unsure as to what it meant at the time. FInally, it died. No hard disk to be found, I promptly brought it to a local shop that replaced it, but only if i shelled out $250. To a student, that isn't easy money to come across and after looking over the bill, the HDD was only $120 of that. The rest went to Service and a reformat of my OS, things I knew i could do myself, but just wasn't sure enough.
today, there are plenty of resources and sellers of parts online to just take matters in your own hands and fix your electronics yourself. It'll teach you valuable lessons about what you use day-by-day and save you a penny or two. I learned how to solder last fall replacing an LCD bulb in my laptop's screen, it's just that easy! After replacing the battery in an ipod touch, a friend told me that I truly do "own my device".
As I listened to spark 136 I was actually taking apart a not very old but dead guitar amplifier, because it had re-usable screws and hardware. As I was taking it apart I wondered how long it took to put it together in the factory in China where it was made… I would likely have been fired from that assembly line pretty quick. What I was thinking was "too bad this thing uses all Phillips head screws…" I'm a big fan othe the Canadian robertson which is less likely to torque out.
As someone who enjoys fixing his own car and appliances, I go out of my way to avoid products that are not user friendly, or hackable. More and more goods are being designed to be disposable. I used to live next to a small appliance repair shop. They finaly went out of business about 10 years ago. There was a massive pile of not worth fixing appliances in a huge heap behind their building….
Thanks for Spark 136. UBB – As a Canadian that looks towards innovation as a way to manage some of my household costs, such as using VoIP instead of Bell, and streaming instead of cable. The switch to UBB is a game changer for me. I have already made the decision once to take the money out of Bell's and the cable provider hands – yet to have them reach back into my wallet. Shame on the CRTC.
Screwy – I am happy to use "good enough technology", and repairing broken technology. It's too bad there are a few bad apples out there…
Usage Based Billing is nothing but a licence to rip off the consumer. Bell & Rogers are worried about people watching content on-line and not on their respective television services. So this is simply a way for them to recover lost revenue instead of giving the consumer what they want.
I have question for them… Does someone who watches TV for 12 hours per day pay more than someone who only watches for maybe 2 hours per day?
Maybe I shouldn't have said that… I don't want to give them any more ideas!
I'm seriously considering getting rid of cable and going back to an antenna, just like in the old days. Not only that, I'm currently working on eliminating my Bell telephone and just using my (Virgin) cell phone. Once bitten… twice shy!
You should know that Virgin is owned by Bell, since 2009.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/07/02/bel…
One possible solution to UBB is to download/stream more and get more for you overage dollar!
Current I have Rogers Extreme for 59.99 I get:
10 Mbps download
just under 1 Mbps upload
95 GB/month cap
$1.50/GB additional usage cost up to a maximum charge of $50.00 (it is stated on my monthly bill that I will only ever be charged a maximum of $50.00/month for overage fees)
$50.00 divide by $1.50/GB = 33.3 GB (on top of the 95GB) to reach the maximum $50.00/month overage charge
I am charged 59.99 for 95 GB/month but could also be charged $50 for 33.3 GB only $10.00 less but a difference of 61.7 GB. 61.7 GB of data downloaded costs $10.00 then why am I being charged $50.00 for 33.3?
if I am going to go over I might as well go way over and get more for my overage dollar if the max is $50.00/month for overage
downloading 128.3 GB/month will cost me $59.99 + $50.00 (max overage) which will cost me the same as downloading 160GB/month or the same as 200GB/month or the same as 300GB/month etc.
max monthly bill can be $109.99 so I might as well download as much as I can to get the most bang for my buck
That is until they start throttling your connection after you reach their max cap and can only get a 56k download rate.
You don't honestly think that they will just overlook that and let you get what you actually deserve do you?
I've been a customer of Rogers for many years now and have never had my connection throttled to a lower speed. I have friends who download a lot of content via torrents and they get throttled, I don't use torrents and have never been throttled.
that is not a solution to UBB at all …. that's just accepting their gouge
I want to sign up for specific high bandwidth services but can't because they would cause me to go over my monthly allowance. Services like nhl gamecenter live alone would cause me to go over my monthly download allowance just by watching 1 game per day. Another service I would like to have is http://www.onlive.com an online gaming site that streams high graphic computer games over the internet, while playing a game it is streaming 5 Mbps continuously. And because I use Rogers for my ISP I get access to http://www.rogersondemand.com which allows me to get my TV show fix and for movies I'd like to get Netflix but not if I have to pay extra because of some downlaod cap. I don't have cable or satellite TV I use an antenna to get free over the air TV and use my computer as my PVR using Windows Media Center. A long time ago when I signed up for my first high speed internet service, the cost was dependant on the speed of the connection/package I chose. At the time the network performance was rated by the speed at which I could download and not how much I could download. I would spend my money on the services mentioned above but I can't because I don't want to be charged for downloading/streaming more than Rogers currently allows me to. But in the end am I being hurt by the monthly cap? Not at all, but those companies won't get Canadian consumers business. Does that bother them? Probably not because they are American companies and our small population compared to theirs doesn't really affect their profits in the long run. And that http://www.rogersondemand.com is a Rogers service but yet the streaming of their content still goes against your monthly allowance.
I have no problem with UBB if they gave us some choice. Now you get 60GB, at the moment I don't come close to that but I have to pay for bandwidth that I do not USE. If they want UBB then bill by the GB and since they are a monopoly show the CRTC the cost and let them decide how much is a fair mark up.
i'm stunned by all the people out there who are just willing to accept caps and UBB, as long as it is fair … you've already been hooked by bell and rogers arguments … the rest of the world pays internet based on speed, why are we so willing to accept 'fair' UBB, that is nonsense … no UBB is the only fair method, same billing model as cable TV and land line phone service, which use the same wires into your home
c'mon people, even if they come up with a 'fair' cap and UBB rate for you now, it won't be fair for long … and just imagine the chaos in families who start fighting over Gb downloaded … besides, the way technology is going, it won't be long before your toaster and toothbrush and automatically downloading updates and drivers, just like your PC sofware does now … and what about all the advertising on web pages, are you going to accept paying for those Gb of images and video streams that download with the news you want to read … canada is on the verge of becoming a starving third world information country, and too many people are willing to roll over and take it, as long as it's 'fair'
maybe we should also start UBB for public transit, pay for your monthly pass, but if you ride more than some arbitrary number of kms, you get charged more for it … the roads are built, just need maintenance, the buses run on schedule no matter how many riders, all fixed costs, just like our internet access, all fixed costs, so why charge someone who uses that service more?
Sorry CBC – Thanks to UBB I can't afford the bandwidth to download and listen to your shows – or stream them.
Bye The National online, Bye Spark podcasts!
This right here is the reason media needs to do its research and get the word out.
I don't want to have anymore of the "free" ads on sites I visit if I have to pay for all the data I download.
Am I alone in this thinking?
You pay for your television and they contain free ads that pop up every 12 minutes…
A lot more people will be using Adblock Plus then, to ensure no bandwidth is wasted on the advertising which pays for media content!
In principle, I don't see UBB as a totally bad thing – backbone capacity is not infinite, and why should an occasional web user subsidize a person who continually streams content from the US.
It would make more sense to use P2P or multicast, and get content locally, than having thousands of identical yet billed separately streams clogging the backbone, but for various reasons that's not happening.
University campuses have demonstrated that young people can consume all available bandwidth, so to be fair to all users we need some way to allocate a finite resource. UBB makes more sense than charging everyone equally – which would be like Canada Post charging a flat fee of $400/year for all the mail you can send.
True if bandwidth hogs actually existed as you thought they did, but in actuality the slowdown of the system is because of the masses using the internet at the same time. As more and more people are turning to the internet for their entertainment medium they will find themselves online more and more often thus creating a larger bog down of the system.
The fix for this would be to limit the amount of people online at any moment or to improve the deployment system. Option A is not going to happen. Option B costs the telecommunication giants money. Money they don't want to spend.
Switching to UBB will not improve the system or lower the bog down it will just stifle the industry.
To make a point more gadgets are being produced that can actively connect to the internet such as internet tv's, netflix on ps3s, smart phones, tablets, so on and so on. This means there will be less reason for many in the upcoming future to continue their subscribing to cable television, radio and the such.
These big companies don't want that. They have many many hands in your pocket and want to make as much money from you as possible and one of the ways they are doing this is by making internet access a luxury.
Don't fool yourself or others by thinking that UBB has been implemented for your benifit. Quite the opposite actually.
the flaw in your thinking is that UBB is not about paying for capacity, its about paying for usage (ie. data, which is infinite) … capacity has fixed costs, like roads, but nobody is suggesting that every road should be a toll road
bill based on speed, not on usage, and let us compete on the same level as the global community
and your acceptance of the misinformation that "occasional web user subsidize a person who continually streams content" breaks down when you realize that business use has not caps, only residential use … if high volume residential users are such a menace to the internet, why are monstrously huge volume business users not a problem? bell is propagating misinformation, and you are eating it … there is far more to this than the early adopters of new internet services, this is more about squashing competition
I want a plugin for firefox that will stop all adds and graphics from being loaded when I go to a web page so not to use up my bandwidth. I don't control the size of the image files used on web sites nor do I control the size of the videos on youtube so I want to block them from being downloaded until I know the size and the effect they will have on my download cap, is there such a plugin? I did not ask to see that picture of Nora Young at the top of this page or the picture of the meter or any of the graphics used on this page. Will CBC compensate me for the use of my bandwidth for putting those graphics on this page and forcing me to download them when I visit the page?
Thanks for the lovely words of advice at the end of the show regarding watching your usage and knowing how much bandwidth we use so we can be prepared for the changes to come. Can you please do a show on how we can determine how much bandwidth picture-heavy websites are, or unwanted ads and pop-ups. I recently started doing things like downloading books, music, video, podcasts, streaming shows (mostly CBC by the way) and would rather save up every byte for those things rather than wasting them on moving ads, and photos. How can we differentiate the usage we want and the usage that just comes up? I am one of those "average" internet users, but was hoping to become more. I guess it will cost me now. What a shame! There is so much more to this UBB issue than has been discussed on Spark so far. I look forward to the show tackling all the other areas. Off to ask my ISP to stop sending me their newsletter — takes up too much space. This is a very backward move for Canada.
It is actually embarrassing to me that our country has this state of disarray in the internet when compared to the rest of the world.
Why not do a show examining that. Lets look at Australia with is UBB situation and then look at South Korea with its unlimited plans, 10X speeds, low cost. Seriously now, who should we be modeling in this global world.
Having said all this, why couldn't some SBB (Server-based billing) be developed?
Both my Windows-7 and my Ubuntu systems, as well as ALL other software has been DLed from the internet.
i.e., I haven't ordered a CD or DVD in years. They're obsolete!
Needless to say, with my Bell Turbohub's UBB, I go to a friend's place in town to DL / torrent any large packages. ..And Win-7 is 2.5 Gig!
So why couldn't ISPs charge the server instead of the user?
If I download a new Ubuntu (coming in 11/04) the DL to me would be free. If however I start to DL a movie, or (Ahem!) some Pr0n, then the meter would start running for me.
… Unless the Pr0n server were willing to pick up the bill!
Charge only for ULs, not DLs! It would cut down a lot of zombie spam too! Particularly when the end user got a big bill from his ISP!
Agreed, it would kinda cramp the PtP torrents stuff though…
Also, like our smart phone plans, you can expect them to start selling "service" package addons, like "unlimited twitter, facebook, youtube" for $5.99 a month, effectively selling the uninformed consumer into paying even more for data packaged in a clever trick. Low bandwidth, easy served platforms that cost them little data, but you think is really great to have added on as unlimited to your plan…you did it with your cell phones…
I was a little let down by your radio show as well. Apparently you have a listening audience and therefore should have some responsibility to either engage in active and intelligent research for topics or at least know the underlying issues. It was like you have read nothing at all, not even the sites you are citing in your show. You have or had the access to talk directly to him, so I fail to see why you did not have some serious questions for him, to have known the actual reality of the issue as well.
"Why is our internet cost among the highest in the free world?"
"Why is our internet service speeds and delivery among the lowest in the free world?"
"Why are we one of the only nations allowing UBB to applied to internet use in the free world?"
"How does downloading 100 gigs in one month equate to downloading 100 gigs in two days?
Usage-based billing is essentially a tax – a fee charged for no additional value. Data networks are not impacted in any way by the total volume of data that pass through them. The useful lives of routers, switches and cabling are not shortened by transmitting data – that hasn’t been the case since the teletype went out of style.
What does matter is the total amount of data per unit of time. Most network gear is rated in terms of bits per second or packets per second. That is why bandwidth limitations are at least a credible excuse, though traffic prioritization is a better way of handling ‘bandwidth hogs’.
It’s good to keep in mind that ISPs, especially telcos such as Bell , are used to keeping equipment for as long as possible in order to maximize profit. Some of the phone switching equipment they use has been in place for many, many years – revenue from this stuff is all ‘gravy’ now. One way of lengthingi the life of network equpment is to limit demand for service, and one way of limiting demand is to jack up prices.
But no, Virginia; there is no legitimate reason for charging users for the total volume of data used. As long as the rate of usage (bits or bytes per second) is not excessive, usage fees are just a gouge – a no-value-added fee much like the ones that kept Canada in the ‘third world’ of cellular phone service for so long.
Usage-based billing isn't a problem per-se, it's simply that the current overage charges are insane.
Personally I'd love to see a utility-style billing model, where you pay $20 (or $30, or whatever) per month for administration, infrastructure, etc. and then a flat rate of 10 cents per GB of data transferred. These should be regulated so the fixed cost is directly related to the true infrastructure costs, and the data transfer rate tied to the true wholesale cost of bandwidth, so it would go down as the wholesale cost drops.
This paradigm maps directly to the actual costs of the ISP, gives consumers as much bandwith as they need at reasonable prices, and provides an incentive for ISPs to give the fastest possible connections to consumers in order to allow them to consume more bandwidth.
Usage-based billing only makes sense, otherwise people that don't use much bandwidth are subsidizing heavy users.
ugh, another victim of the telco misinformation campaign …. internet service is NOT like a utility, there is no data mine or well with a finite amount of data that can be consumed … and the whole subsidizing heavy users is just crap, nonsense for the masses … they got you hook line and sinker
i think a more appropriate analogy would be to any other public network, like roads or transit systems … do you also think it only makes sense to make every road a toll road? how about billing overage charges to monthly transit pass holders once they have travelled over some arbitrary number of kilometres because they are heavy users? or an even better comparison, to existing cable tv and phone networks where nobody talks about light tv viewers subsidizing heavy tv viewers, yet the same digital streams over the same network lines is used for internet as it is for cable tv and phone service … think about it
as for the actual costs of the ISP, once the network is built, it needs maintenance and upgrading, these are all fixed costs … UBB has nothing to do with those fixed costs, it is a variable way for telcos and cablecos to generate excessive revenue from the traffic on that paid for network … and anyone who thinks its fair now, won't think so for very long as web usage is growing exponentially across all of society … those 'heavy users' that you and bell keep talking about are just the early adopters
Issue is quite nuanced, and unfortunately most of the people (on both sides of the debate) are talking about something very different than the recent CRTC decision.
There is congestion on the *Internet*, and sometimes Internet transit companies charge ISPs a per-GB fee (fractions or pennies per-GB). An *Internet* service provider needs to be offered a full toolbox of ways to manage that congestion. There is throttling, metering (UBB) and a number of other options.
The problem is that the Gateway Access Service (GAS) used by companies who have not been granted the last-mile right-of-way exception to property rights (Ability to put wires above and below private and public property without permission or payment) is not an *Internet* service. It is a raw DATA service over which anything should be able to be put such as IPTV, VOIP, VPN's or sometimes even packets destined to the Internet. Corporate clients of the GAS DATA service fully compensate the phone companies in that they pay for a given bandwidth (IE: maximum speed) they are offered, and should be free to handle their own customers within that bandwidth their own way. The phone company has no business monitoring, metering or managing raw data within these conduits.
The phone and cable companies have been successful in confusing the public and the CRTC into believing this is an *Internet* issue when it isn't. It is a competition issue, one where if ISPs/etc were allowed to compete in a free market there would be matching options for everyone. Some customers like UBB, some prefer throttling, and some would prefer to pay a higher fixed price to be guaranteed that they wouldn't get either.
The point is that it is the phone and cable companies that are standing in the way of there being these options, and no matter whether we support or oppose UBB we should be opposing the phone and cable companies imposing their specific choices on the entire industry.
I’m a Canadian living in Taiwan on the verge of leaving and this is adding just one more reason for me not to come back to Canada.
I’m a teacher, just a teacher, but increasingly my work uses the internet to take advantage of media in order to create better lessons help students learn more about their natural and digital world around them.
Here in Taiwan I paid roughly $40CDN for 6 months of service and my speed is usually around 300-400kbps. Canada is already way too expensive to live in, why are we tagging on another price to the one thing that still feels free?
Sorry Canada, this Canuck is staying in Asia.
If a finance company promises investors greater returns than it can possibly provide to all it’s customers at any one time, that’s called a Ponzi scheme and the perpetrators go to jail.
If a network company promises customers more bandwidth than it can possibly provide to all it’s customers at any one moment, somehow that’s supposed to be a viable business model.
It’s time this issue was addressed as a clear cut case of fraud.
First, a small niggle: Many of the interviewees (and Nora herself!) in the UBB segments made the increasingly popular error of using the term "bandwidth" to mean "usage". The two are separate terms, and I think this is where a lot of the public confusion about UBB comes from. Bandwidth is the maxim speed at which data is uploaded and downloaded, measured in e.g, megabits per second (Mb/s); and usage (aka allowance, quota) is the /amount/ of data transferred, measured in, e.g., gigabits per billing cycle. UBB is the change from billing based on bandwidth (speed of connection) to billing based on usage.
While I'm not opposed to UBB in theory, there are several problems with it:
There are now (at least) three numbers that consumers need to compare when they're shopping for rates: upstream bandwidth, downstream bandwidth, and usage cap. The more variables you have to compare, the more likely you're going to give up and not bother comparing. Cf. cell phone plans.
As far as I've seen, there is a huge lack of tools and equipment to actually monitor one's usage. Having lived in Australia where quotas are the norm, all ISPs offer two tools: a website where you can check how much usage you've incurred on your connection, and a downloadable, installable (generally Windows-only) tool to see this same number. I know of no tools or devices that can monitor usage per device, per user, per application, per host, or anything useful. This is problematic, because if you continue to exceed your quota every month, it's fairly difficult for your average Joe (or even an ISP's technician) to find out WHY. Also, ISPs tend to have a list of sites that are "unmetered", like their own streaming services, customer service websites, etc., but besides this list, there's no way to tell when your traffic is unmetered
Bandwidth-based billing (BBB, if you will) has always been a bit of a lie. When you pay (e.g.) Rogers for cable internet at 10Mb/s, 10Mb/s is the theoretical maximum you will get. Your maximum throughput is also limited by the maximum of the speed at every "hop" along the path between you and the other party you're connected to. However, compounding the problem is that fact that ISPs "oversubscribe" their links: They often will put more than 100x10Mb/s links on a 1Gb/s upstream link (e.g.). Most of the time this is not a problem, but during the Superbowl when everyone's streaming HD video content and using their actual paid-for allotment to its full potential, you realize that you don't get 10Mb/s, you get the upstream link divided by the number of users. The ISP solution to this is not of course to say, "We screwed up and didn't think that people would ever use the Internet this much; our new numbers will hereafter reflect your real bandwidth" rather, "We're going to start charging you through using this second variable that's a lot harder to measure."
Re: your segment on Solitude: I've been a teleworker for almost 10 years now and while I'm prolific online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a multitude of other sites throughout the day, posting, commenting, sharing and the like, my house rests in total silence. While I work away in my attic office, I can hear and feel when my kindly neighbour opens and closes my side door to let our cats in from outside. I need it that way. While CBC Radio starts off my everyday in the bathroom and kitchen, once the kids are dropped off and I'm settled at my desk, the radio goes off and you can literally hear a pin drop in my home, which is why when my husband has a day off or the kids come early, it's a struggle for me to maintain my work mode.
I make a living off streaming and uploading stuff on youtube and the fact that my internet cost me 120$ per month for 240GB cap is killing me. I can't get better and I live 20mins away from montreal. I hate canada for it's internet. We are getting **** over.