Article content

Only two out of 30 countries surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) offer their citizens no Internet subscriptions with unlimited downloads.

Canada is one of them.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Usage-based Internet billing: a global comparison Back to video

The other is Australia, but that is beside the point. The point, rather, is simply to broaden the context of the

beyond just the Canadian market; to consider just how common it is for every Internet service provider (ISP) in a given country to impose limits on the amount of data their customers can consume each month.

Quite far from common, the vast majority of OECD countries appear to offer some form of Internet service that is free of any preset limit. Yet based on the offers of 22 ISPs in Canada and 38 in Australia, not one of them had an unlimited package advertised on their respective websites.

New Zealand, Iceland and Belgium each provide only a handful of unlimited data packages for their consumers. However, among the other 24 countries surveyed, less than half of their ISPs charged customers extra for exceeding their monthly limits.