Users of Canadian cable provider Cogeco are up in arms over a new capping policy imposed by the company late last month. While Cogeco has always had some kind of caps in place for as long as we can recall, they've recently decided to combine both upstream and downstream bandwidth into one monthly cap. Said caps differ depending on which tier of service you sign up for.

According to the company's website, 640kbps/150kbps "Lite" customers now have a combined monthly cap of 10GB, 10Mbps/640kbps "Standard" customers now have a combined monthly cap of 60GB and 16Mbps/1Mbps "Pro" customers now have a combined monthly cap of 100GB.

Users are complaining that the change happened mid-month, without an appropriate heads-up to customers. Users also say that after the change was implemented, they were being threatened with account termination without any warning that they were approaching the cap (or with warnings that came too late).

A Cogeco network technician tells us that the lack of warnings were due to an internal problem that has since been corrected. Users are supposed to get two e-mail alerts, followed by a "three strikes and you're out" suspension system -- whereby users can either upgrade to a beefier package or go without broadband until month's end.

"It's tighter than before," says the tech of the new policy. "If you're transferring tons of traffic you should probably move to a more appropriate package (ie: doing 100GB/mo on a Lite package)." Many of our forum regulars say they'll solve the problem by transferring to a provider that doesn't have monthly caps.