Lynn Lau
Northern News Services

Inuvik (Jan 28/02) - When Sheila Mattson signed up for a cable Internet account last month, she was delighted with the quick connection -- until she learned how quickly it could break the bank.

Along with her January bills, Mattson got a nasty surprise -- the $738 invoice for her family's December Internet usage.

"We were just totally shocked," she says. "We couldn't believe it."

Mattson, her husband and their three teenage children had previously been using New North Network's dial-up Internet service, which costs $26.70 a month.

That service calculates usage by the hour.

Mattson says since her family had never exceeded the maximum 75 hours, she didn't realize their usage would be a problem when they upgraded to New North's cable Internet service.

But in one month, the Mattson family unwittingly racked up 2220 megabytes of uploads and downloads -- 2100 megabytes more than was included in their package. At 30 cents per megabyte, the additional usage added up fast.

The family thought they could leave the computer on all the time since they figured if they weren't using it, there wouldn't be any megabytes being transferred. They learned the hard way that even when no one is using the computer, certain programs might be transferring data over the Internet.

"It just felt like we weren't properly informed of what it entailed," Mattson says. "We didn't understand it."

New North maintains an online usage metre for customers, but Mattson says she didn't know enough to look for it.

Mattson is one of a handful of customers who were caught this month by New North's new policy of charging customers for additional usage.

New North's network manager John Boudreux says the company had to make the changes to keep offering the cable Internet service.

"It's extremely expensive to bring this service into the community and there are very few other places that can actually do it as a business," he says.

He says customers can avoid the problems Mattson had by cutting down on video streaming, Web radio and other activities that involve high volume transfers.

New North sent all cable Internet customers their estimated bills in November and December to allow them the chance to see what their usage costs would be, before they were actually charged for it.

But customers like Mattson, who received her first bill in January, didn't have the benefit of the warning.

When Mattson complained to the company, the account was retroactively upgraded to the highest use package (which costs $80 a month but charges less for additional traffic). Even with the change, the bill still came out to $454.68. Mattson paid it and promptly went back to dial-up service.