Rogers Shrinks Download Limits As Netflix Arrives 281
Meshach writes "Hot on the heels of Netflix coming to Canada, Rogers (one of the biggest ISPs in Canada) has shrunk download limits. 'As of Wednesday, new customers who sign up for the Lite service will be allowed 15 gigabytes, a drop from the 25 GB limit offered to those who signed up before July 21. Meanwhile, any new Lite user who goes over the monthly limit will have to pay $4 per GB up to a maximum of $50 — a spike from the previous $2.5 per GB surcharge.' Officially, there is no connection between the two events, but it seems an odd coincidence, especially when Rogers charges customers who exceed their bandwidth allowance."
Why is overflow so expensive? (Score:5, Insightful)
I like how the overflow bandwidth costs over 500% wholesale costs. $4.5 is just insane. I almost wonder if 3G bandwidth isn't cheaper than that. Just goes to show that they aren't doing this in order to offer everyone a good service, but rather to punish and blackmail moderate users into buying a higher tier subscription service.
Ummmm. Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
I can understand limits on consumer lines. You can have fast and cheap, but not all the time if you want fast all the time it costs more. Ok, but that still needs to be a reasonable amount. The 250GB cap Comcast does is quite reasonable. That's enough to do a whole lot and never get near it. Mainly the compulsive torrenters are the ones affected. But 15GB? That is just stupidly low. You can hit that without Netflix. Surf the web regularly, watch Youtube, download some game patches and you are there.
Talk about unreasonable :P.
Expect to see more of this... (Score:5, Insightful)
And a big marketting push to Rogers on Demand (Score:5, Insightful)
At the same time, they are pushing their Rogers on Demand service to all their customers too. http://www.rogersondemand.com/ [rogersondemand.com]
Which means either charging people to watch TV content by 'downloading' it, or maybe, will they give a break to people who are on their network to use their service?
This is precisely why net neutrality is important and required.
Important to note... (Score:2, Insightful)
Consumer Protection (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ummmm. Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
Game patches? Just download A game you bought from Steam. Or better, a free weekend promo on Steam. They offered a free weekend of CoD:MW2 which was 11.2 GB. Then Serious Sam HD weighing 2 GB. Then insane price cuts for 24 hours on random games which each easily was over 5 GB. The world has gone digital. You can easily download 25+ GB a month by just buying a few older games at random Digital Download sellers like Steam, Direct2Drive, Impulse, and others.
Rogers vs. Netflix (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:bill by bandwidth used (Score:1, Insightful)
Why don't cities bill pedestrians and motorists by the number of miles they've traveled so the bedridden and terminally-handicapped don't pay for streets they don't use ? You could also add a door-crossing fee to the bill as well. They could offer weight tiers for the users so the fatter the walker, the more expensive the amount per mile.
This is done in the USA. It is called gas tax and title taxes. Also, heavy haulers pay significantly more.
Re:...And Rogers rents movies, too (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, whether or not they're connected, your recorded lack of payment on rented movies could show up on a credit score which the telco referenced as reason for you to not pay telephone bills and denied your application.
Re:You Know (Score:3, Insightful)
DSL, point to point wireless, Shaw, etc.
Anyway, this is a classic Netwrok Neutrality casebook example.
Where a carrier of multiple services (such as Rogers), favours their own content with substantially better rates of carriage,
they are blatantly breaching Network Neutrality.
Being as this is a near monopoly situation for many of their customers,
a strong case can and must be made for legislation and intervention.
Too bad we live in Canada where on issues like this governments an be so easily bought.
Re:Yes, I am a power user... (Score:3, Insightful)
I admit that I am a power user. My point was that I can hit the 250GB cap alone, without netflix and without illegal torrent downloads. If I can do it alone without netflix; a family can easily hit the cap and exceed it when you add in multiple people accessing the internet at the same time especially if you have multiple people streaming movies. That is why the cap is unreasonable.
My other point was that in the future we will demand bandwidth in ever increasing amounts yet the caps will hold us back. Looking back at the history of computers, my first computer had 5k of ram. Then 64k, 128k... My first PC had 512k which was less then the 640k max. Now I type this on a laptop with 4GB. (And yes as a power user it is not unusual to get to the point of hitting the swap partition.) Media was the same way, from 360k floppies to 1.4mb, 640mb cds, 4.3gb dvds, and now we are at the point of 50GB blu-rays. And sometimes (especially with games) we get to the point that we need multiple disks. No one dreamed of using all this memory and storage just a few years ago... Why do you think bandwidth that is barely adequate today will be sufficient tomorrow?
As for why I am complaining, it is simple... Once the infrastructure is built, it does not cost more to transmit 2MB over the network than it does to send 1MB. Companies advertise an "# Mbps" connection for a certain price and then overcharge us if we actually use it. Also, here in the US, we have literally given BILLIONS of dollars to the telecommunication companies to build out the network(through government subsidies and tax breaks); yet our access is more expensive and slower than many other industrialized nations. All this while the executives are complaining that they are losing money while getting multi-million dollar bonuses. (And when Time Warner announced it was testing smaller caps a year ago, people found out through their earnings reports that their internet division was raking in the dough without caps, and while barely putting any money into improving the infrastructure.)