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.
Re:Why is overflow so expensive? (Score:5, Informative)
I like how the overflow bandwidth costs over 500% wholesale costs.
I think you mean times, not percent. My host reserves the right to charge 4p/GB, which works out at about 6 Canadian cents (although they won't charge me if other users on the same connection don't go over their threshold and their upstream provider doesn't charge them). This is including their upstream provider's markup in their transit costs, so for a large ISP with peering arrangements the cost is likely to be closer to one Canadian cent per GB.
Of course, that's ignoring the cost of the last mile bandwidth. The caps are, at least in theory, picked as arbitrary numbers that prevent the last mile connection from being saturated.
Re:Why is overflow so expensive? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why is overflow so expensive? (Score:4, Interesting)
Dude, they punish and blackmail EVERY TIER. My internet bill is about $120 because I am one of those who consistently uses more than 95gb per month. According to Rogers, people who use that kind of bandwidth can only be evil pirates. According to my own traffic logs, I am a geek who really values offsite backups, remote desktop access and ferrying new content to/from my web server somewhere in Seattle.
Rogers is ass, but they're the lesser of several evils up here. Bell's network conks out on a daily basis, even when it's up the speed is pathetic and latency is worse than my old 9600 baud. All the other "ISPs" are Bell resellers, cheaper but equally fucked - even the legendary TekSavvy is at the mercy of Bell's colonary spasms.
And I have yet to hear any word about residential fiber up here. What Bell calls "Fibe" is just ADSL 2 and the fiber terminates at the DSLAM, like it has for 15 years.
What do I want ? Simple. I want a 100mbit shared line in my building. They call this place "Silicon Valley North", well then where's my fucking pipe ?
If I guess by the number of WiFi networks I've scanned, at least 25 tenants have broadband in my building alone. Now being a sysadmin, I know a thing or two about fiber, and I know that 25 times $50 a month is enough to bring a 100mb line here. With a bit of infrastructure, that could be aggregated up to a gbit line to service a few city blocks. It's certainly more bandwidth than Rogers is providing us.
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TekSavvy is not a Bell reseller. It uses Bell's last-mile connection and GAS (Gateway Access Service), but subscribes to its own backbone providers. It has also started laying its own fiber in a few small communities. For those with an interest in Canadian ISPs, it is very important to not spread the myth that TekSavvy is a Bell reseller, as this is what allows Bell to whine and complain to the government about how they were not allowed to charge TekSavvy per GB used by TekSavvy customers.
Unfortunately, the
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Ok so the "reseller" shorthand is inaccurate, and yes I know how it actually works with TekSavvy renting transit over the DSLAM only. The problem is Bell is still involved in the process, and as we have seen, Bell has taken advantage of that position to throttle other people's traffic in a very anti-competitive fashion.
I still think the solution to all these moronic issues is to dissove both Bell and Rogers and assimilate them back as government-owned services. At best, for-profit utilities do not benefit
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Hey I'd love to! Just put up about $50M in start-up capital and I'm there :P
Do it. (Score:2)
Get your neighbors together in your building. Propose a plan after checking with ISPs. Tell them you want business class service, and how much it is. Then split that with your neighbors. This might be fiber. It might not.
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Don't worry, with the advent of Netflix streaming, soon you'll be an evil video-watcher.
We've hit 50GB this month streaming about 1 hour of television a night + 10 GB offsite backup. Anyone with a full household and netflix can expect to stream much, much more than that.
The more common those usage patterns become, the more high-bandwidth users seem normal. And then hopefully we'll start seeing offsite backup services with the bandwidth to actually support the damned services they sell.
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Don't worry, with the advent of Netflix streaming, soon you'll be an evil video-watcher.
No he won't, they'll still claim those going over their quotas are evil pirates because that's easier to justify publicly than saying they just watch too much online video. Limits as small as Rogers is using have nothing to do with stopping the top 1% of users (another saying ISPs are fond of trotting out) "abusing" their bandwidth and everything to do with padding the company's bottom line while trying to make it look like they aren't raising the actual monthly bill. (Since all the extra money gets hidde
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According to Rogers, people who use that kind of bandwidth can only be evil pirates. According to my own traffic logs, I am a geek who really values offsite backups,
So that's what they are calling it now!
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No. It's called business - they charge what the market can bear. When you buy a coffee for $2, do you really think it cost them that much? I had a friend in the coffee shop business and it cost him about $0.04 per POT for coffee.
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Re:Why is overflow so expensive? (Score:5, Informative)
I had a friend in the coffee shop business and it cost him about $0.04 per POT for coffee.
I think it's neat how you still keep in touch with your friends who live in 1963.
Green coffee beans trade at wholesale prices of somewhere upward of one dollar per pound on international markets. Specialty, fair trade, organic, or higher-grade beans will cost more.
Let's assume that your friend is using a small, 50-ounce coffeepot. Figure that will take a couple of ounces of ground, roasted coffee. Two ounces at one dollar per pound is a bit more than twelve cents' worth of green beans. That assumes that there is no cost to roast the coffee, package the coffee, store the coffee, or deliver the coffee; it also ignores the fact that coffee is actually trading closer to $1.66 [tradingcharts.com], and that it will lose another fifteen percent [wikia.com] of its mass when roasted.
Heck, if the barista making the coffee earns $7.25 an hour (the U.S. federal minimum wage), then four cents pays her for a hair less than twenty seconds of work. I hope that you're not expecting anyone to spend time to wash those coffeepots and mugs. If the coffeemaker draws 1200 watts, and electricity is ten cents per kWh, then the ten minutes it took to brew the pot just burned through half our budget: 2 cents.
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But in a healthy market, isn't "the invisible hand of the market" supposed to drive the price down to the costs? There sure seem to be a lot of unhealthy markets around!
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Why? Because they can.
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.
Re:Ummmm. Ouch (Score:5, Interesting)
Comcast's 250gb cap is reasonable? No it isn't, it is just a way for them to avoid investing more money in building their network and in addition protect their own movie service.
Between downloading patches, linux distros, and porn along with working from home connecting to remote machines, I have come up against that limit without netflix or any other movie streaming. (And this is all legal activity with bit torrent only being used for linux distros.)
Now if you add to that netflix or some other provider, add an additional tv or two, how much bandwidth can a family of four people use? They can easily break the 250GB barrier. (I did it alone.)
And this is today... in the future we will be expecting lossless HD video, video calling, and sharing home movies with friends and relatives instead of just pictures. Online games are just going to require more and more bandwidth and who knows how much bandwidth the next killer app will use or how addicted the next bunch of morons will be to the website that eventually slays facebook.
Comcast and all the others want to protect their monopolies (or duopolies as appropriate) and to increase their profit margins with the least bit of effort. The cost of bandwidth is in building it, it does not cost more to transfer extra bits over the network.
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Get over the cap you've got, hearing the whines about Comcast just makes me want to punch someone when you compare with what others get.
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. Looki
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i wish i could get business class line from Rogers. :(
but the wont provide the service to any area not zoned commercial/retail/industrial by the local municipality.
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If you look at their plans [rogers.com], you can see tha
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FTA:
“ensure we are giving those with higher demands the option to choose more speed or bandwidth while ensuring those whose needs are not as great to have lower priced tiers,”
And yet, they are lowering the cap on the "Extreme" service by 12%.
For comparison, I push out an average of 4500gb a month on my colocated web server, and it costs less than my residential cable internet. What Rogers is charging for overage is about 200 times my relatively high bulk cost, considering I'm small peas in the colo world.
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.
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Understood, but buying games as such is still a bit of a geek thing. Don't believe the hype that most sales are digital, they aren't. That recent "study" was actually just a poll takes online. Hmmmm, selection bias much? According to publishers, retail still dominates, about 4 of every 5 sales.
My point was simply to be that you can easily run over your cap with normal, non "power user" activities. You don't even need Steam or Netflix to hit 15gb. The plan is insufficient for everyone but extremely casual su
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I didn't want to undermine your point. I just wanted to note that one random game can be over a third of your limit. And that can be free too.
As for the poll, meh. Retail is still king for consoles, but when I see TES4: Oblivion GOTY Edition at Steam for something like 7$ then yeah. Retail can dream on.
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I personally buy a ton of games online, I've 40 or so on Steam, probably 30 on Impulse. However I buy a ton of games in general, and I'm generally technically adept and happy to use new technologies. I'm just pointing out that as of yet, it is a "niche" thing. It is maybe 20% of sales. Nothing to sneeze at, but still the minority.
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Time to jump ship (Score:2)
Time to jump ship by the looks of things. Best vote with your choice of ISP.
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The problem is, there is almost nowhere to jump to in most areas. I live in Toronto, where Bell is pretty much the only other major player, and their rates are just as brutal as Rogers'.
Currently I'm with Acanac, who lease their lines from Bell. The speed isn't as good as it was with Rogers or Bell, but it's one of the few options left (the only other one I know is Teksavvy) for getting away with no bandwidth cap.
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That's correct. I live in Ontario, and I have two ISP choices really. Rogers, or Bell. Maybe a 3rd party DSL service which is still on bell's backbone, and which bell still throttles. I'm still paitently waiting for some form of competition against rogers. But right now, I'm screwed and getting pillaged. Oddly enough my sister who's moving out to Alberta is getting cable internet $20/mo less and 20gb more on the cap.
Since Teksavvy is opening into cable markets it's looking promising but the rollout is
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That's good if one lives in Toronto. But sadly as much as some people think, Toronto is not the centre of Ontario, or Canada. :)
Re:Time to jump ship (Score:4, Informative)
You'd think that slash-dotters would know better...
The smaller companies in no way resell Bell services. They provide their own. They do lease the last mile and transit to their centers..
The cost of bandwidth (Score:4, Interesting)
We buy a raw 100Mbit/100Mbit Internet connection with guarantied bandwidth for 1300 US$/month. We haven't renegotiated that price in a while, but I hear that bandwidth prices have been falling very fast since then. A big ISP would probably get bandwidth cheaper still.
Our current price works out to 25GB/$ if we use it 100% 24/7. So if you are paying more than 15/25=60cents for our Internet connection limited to 15GB/month, then you are being cheated.
I really don't get why Internet connection limits are so often so low. The fraction of the price you pay which actually goes to cover Internet bandwidth costs in a normal Internet connection is miniscule.
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Re:The cost of bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
Internet connections are grossly oversold. I worked in an ISP once, where the upstream we had was sufficient to cover ONE full-use customer. At any given time, there were 50 online. Because of how people used the connections (net surfing, checking e-mail) the burst was fine. But anyone who tried a sustained transfer was getting garbage. And there were times of day when even the bursty nature of customer usage was too much, and the network was dogg-slow. Of course, we blamed it on DSL routing and old telephone lines. But the fact was the last mile was owned by a telco who re-sold bulk access to us for more than they charged customers directly. So we had to charge as little as possible (which was always more than them, of course), and set up with as small of an overhead buffer as possible.
ISP's are just expensive. Customer service people don't come cheap, compared to how much people pay (if net on each customer is $10 a month, a minimum of 500 customers' worth of income just goes to one person to handle all of the phone calls. With 500 customers, there will be 5 or so that demand attention every hour of every waking bloody day. Add in actual engineers, advertising, the shrinking revenue base... it's tough. One big corner that basically has to be cut is upstream. The question is how deeply you cut. And when you're looking at cutting back something many people wouldn't notice, or cutting your own salary to shreds, most people go for the former.
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I really don't get why Internet connection limits are so often so low. The fraction of the price you pay which actually goes to cover Internet bandwidth costs in a normal Internet connection is miniscule.
Mostly it's due to two reasons: 1. the ISPs don't want to actually spend any money upgrading their networks, because that'd lower their profits in the short term (although they're going to pay for this dearly at some point in the future) and 2. it's an easy way to make more money off your customers both without upgrading, and most importantly, without raising the regular fees. By hiding the extra costs in overage charges, and marketing it so it sounds like only evil people (pirates, bandwidth hogs, etc.) w
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15GB limit? Thats like what, a few hours of HQ youtube? Am using upwards of a TB a month, and would be really sad if they had placed any kind of cap.
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-And they wouldn't complain if you used it 100% 24/7?
-And you are guarantied to always have 100Mbit available?
-And you are allowed to use the line for whatever you want, including reselling?
We share the line between 238 apartments. Which works out to less $10, for what is effectively almost always 100/100Mbit (I bet your line is also oversubscribed at your internet provider). So actually, our cost is 1/4 of yours :).
Expect to see more of this... (Score:5, Insightful)
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You hit the nail on the head. Here's a story from last week about Netflix being offered in Canada: http://www.thestar.com/business/article/837394--netflix-to-bring-internet-movies-and-tv-to-canada [thestar.com]
Here are some choice quotes:
and
Switch to Teksavvy (Score:4, Informative)
I switched to Teksavvy Cable a month ago and it's awesome. No throttling, 200GB cap, and 10/1 speeds for $42. You can't match that with any other provider in Toronto.
$4/gb is highway robbery (Score:5, Informative)
This is obviously abusing a semi-monopoly to conduct price gouging, and the government should intervene.
Typical prices ISPs will pay for is the mere one-time cost of network equipment plus ~$25/Megabit/Mo, for a commitment to transfer data, the price is typically the same no matter how much data's transferred as long as the 95th-percentile traffic rate's not over the commit (95th percentile billing on a burstable link), otherwise known as $25,000/month per gigabit.
Sometimes an ISP might buy more bandwidth at different times of the day than others, but, in any case, they would do that because the cost is less, not more than the typical market rates.
Over a 1000Mbps backhaul, approximately 800 customers can be downloading 1 Megabit continuously 24/7, at an approximate avg cost to the ISP of $3125 per customer for that data, but in that case, 324000MB is transferred per customer on avg per month, resulting that each Megabyte transferred costs the ISP approximately $0.009 per megabyte.
Web hosting providers will typically charge $0.15 to $0.80 per GB per month on average.
Roger's "overage pricing" is like 4X the rate charged by even the most greedy of hosting providers.
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I live in Bulgaria btw and i get a very low latency with the entire european union/ asia.
With the Americas you can still download/seed but it's no good for real time playing like in FPS games.
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First of all, you concentrate on the $4/GB, but ignoring the $50/month cap. If you go just a little over, you may pay as little as $4. Doesn't seem like highway robbery to me. If you go a LOT over, you don't have to pay more than $86. No threats of being cut off like with Comcast... You get to have unlimited Internet for $86. Again, doesn't seem like highway robbery to me.
You talk about how much wholesale Internet costs, but this just isn't wholesale s
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Come to Australia. Unless you're very careful you'll find yourself signed up to plans that charge tens of cents or even dollars per extra MEGABYTE
Economies of scale (Score:2)
Not to mention that the more people who have the ISP the more profit the ISP makes thus making it even easier to lay more cables and inc
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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.
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Last time I looked they were only charging for content coming from outside of their network, as such they are using this artificially low limit to boost the effectiveness of their rogers on demand..
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Rogers is first a cable company; and have a monopoly on cable tv in much of densely (in both senses) populated Canada. They are manipulating the bandwidth caps to protect the cable business. Expect to see Bell to follow, as they have their satellite TV business to protect. The CRTC (a bit like a neutered and mewling version of the FCC) will back them up to the hilt; I think they are being blackmailed by Bell and Rogers.
Eventually, these moves will be the unwinding of Rogers; few businesses survive bun
Two plans changed (Score:3, Informative)
I am a Rogers customer. I like the speed and latency (Express plan), but hate the bandwidth cap. Normally, I don't go over it, but occasionally do so.
Here is a matrix of their plans [rogers.com].
Two plans changed for new clients signing up after July 21: Lite and Extreme. Lite is what the summary describes. Extreme was 95GB for $60 a month, now it is 80GB.
They want to make money in two ways: via their own video service, and by charging extra for bandwidth that people will use for Netflix.
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Thanks for linking to the plans; it allows all of the different options to be put in perspective. It also shows that if I lived in Canada, I'd get 125 GB for about what I'm paying here in New Zealand for 40 GB (although Rogers' overage charges are far more expensive). So, I'm afraid that I have very little pity when the Rogers rates are comparatively low.
Important to note... (Score:2, Insightful)
...And Rogers rents movies, too (Score:5, Interesting)
You failed to mention that Rogers Video is one of the largest chains of movie rental shops in Canada. That's what makes this an especially weird coincidence.
At one point, I couldn't get a cell phone from Rogers the telco, apparently because I owed some late fees to Rogers the movie rental shop, which I could only pay at the movie shop. So I went with another telco. Weird, anyway; I hadn't realized they were all so tightly connected.
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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.
Consumer Protection (Score:2, Insightful)
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That is changing, at least in Alberta - Shaw and Telus both supply internet here, and have for over a decade.
What's new (and interesting to me) is that each is pushing rather aggressively into each other's monopolies - Shaw got into the phone business years ago (if memory serves, they made a huge push during the last Telus strike and got a nice foothold), and Telus started offering TV a year or two back (and judging from the every-other-week phone calls, is pushing very hard to make inroads on the TV side).
Go with a small ISP (Score:2)
Rogers vs. Netflix (Score:4, Insightful)
Former Rogers employee (Score:5, Interesting)
(sorry for length, hope this might be helpful, probably overstaing obvious, anyways.....)
I don't want to bash Rogers, they paid me a good salary and I had a great experience working there many years ago.
I'm far removed from the company now, but I *think* and it appears marketing/management strategy remains unchanged.
My experience though in sales has been that the marketing and upper management has some strange way of making promotions and changing products for better (and unfortunately) worse. Most of the promotions are pretty positive and get a lot of new customers and sales for cable, PPV, specialty channels and Internet. This new download cap probably won't be a problem since most customers don't use or understand the Internet much. I'll bet most are just check e-mail and news and won't even use close to 15 GB. I'd be more concerned if I were a parent. Kids with an XBox 360 or PS3, what with downloading patches, playing online, demos and Torrent, Netflix, Youtube, blah blah blah. The parents don't use the net much, but the kids you can't control and the kids and parents probably don't realize how much is being downloaded.
I makes no sense to me that it would cost the ISP (Rogers) more for bandwidth as time goes on. I would think bandwidth costs would decrease and extra services like mail servers (a lot use Gmail, hotmail), news servers are no more, and I would think less people have 'homepages'.
Rogers is not unlike Bell, Shaw and to the US neighbors AT&T and Sprint etc in that they like any company wanting to make a profit and draw people away from competitors. Bell also has TV/Satellite offerings. So given industry trends, I won't be surprised if this bandwidth change is directly related to a conflict of interest, one they know the CRTC won't touch or are too slow to move.
I live in Vancouver, so I've also the opportunity as with Ontario and Quebec residents, to be a TekSavvy customer. It costs me more with a dry line, but well worth escaping the Telus or Shaw. Bonus - they are more than generous with bandwidth. I'm happy with service - as long as Telus doesn't start pissing me off by trying to get the useless CRTC to cap non Telus DSL subscribers on their loop. As taxpayers, we've more than subsided the Ma Bells - to the point these should probably be considered public infrastructure.
Bell + Rogers = Evil Duopoly (Score:2)
The situation in Canada sucks. Bell and Rogers do whatever they want and the CRTC goes along with it.
Oh, well, I don't have cable TV or Internet, but I do have cell phone service through Rogers. Time to jump ship to Wind Mobile, I think...
I'm ok with overage charging... (Score:2)
For comparison, the Extreme Plus plan is about what I'm paying in the US for Comcast, at $70/month. That offers 125GB of transfer per month, or half the Comcast cap. Of course, it also offers 25mbps download and 1mbps upload, which is better than the 16mbps and 876kbps I get.
But what happens if I go over my 250GB cap? Comcast seems to be saying they
It's the LITE service. (Score:3, Informative)
Not to take the side of the cable company, but the Lite service is the second from the bottom in terms of cost. It's not meant for the high-end bandwidth consumer. As the site says, that service is stated to be "Perfect for email, moderate web surfing, and sharing files." It's 3M/256k with a 15 gig monthly limit. However, if you plan to download several movies a day, this clearly isn't going to be enough for you. Thankfully, the company offers OTHER service options. The Ultimate plan, has 50/2 and a 175 gig limit, with only 50 cents per additional gig. Of course, you'll pay more for that plan, but I don't think anyone was seriously thinking that the second cheapest service plan should have completely unlimited bandwidth.
And if the ultimate plan isn't enough for you, there are business plans available which will offer even more, although it's likely going to cost more and the plans apparently aren't available to view on the site. But this is pretty typical for a cable company. I'm not sure what the complaint is supposed to be.
-Restil
It seems there is more... (Score:3, Informative)
My understanding is that both Rogers and Bell are also trying to persuade the CRTC to government regulated download limits of 60 GB for all ISPs. This of course would allow them to protect themselves from customers going to another ISP.
Also, before shrinking download limits, they've also doubled overlimit fees [stopthecap.com].
They've began to offer on ad supported on-demand video online [stopthecap.com], except this "free" video is still subject to their usage limits.
Re:You Know (Score:5, Informative)
Boycott Rogers.
And switch to what, exactly?
They have a geographical monopoly across virtually all of Canada. If you live in an area serviced by them, you have a choice between Rogers and Rogers. Are you seriously asking people to give up entirely on the internet?
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In the most extreme case, you can start-up your own cable company to fight Rogers. That's exactly what Aurora Cable Internet did, and they're still the fastest and cheapest cable Internet provider in Canada.
Re:You Know (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm not sure where this "If you're in an area with Rogers, there's only Rogers." Here in Alberta, we've got Shaw for cable, as well as Telus for... whatever they offer. As far as I know, any area with Rogers has at least one other competing cable company. So there's not just alternatives, there's equivalent alternatives.
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We're actually a bit lucky in Alberta - Shaw and Telus have varying quality depending on what neighborhood you're in (my Shaw service is superior, but my parents get better speed/reliability with Telus). From what I'm seeing they're actually having to (gasp) compete for service.
Additionally, in the Edmonton area there's a few smaller players who are trying to get into the Wifi end of things. I don't live in any of their footprints, so can't speak for quality, though.
Re:You Know (Score:5, Interesting)
And switch to what, exactly?
DSL. If you can't live without cable modem, then that's the choice you've made. Those with more flexible connectivity criteria have more options and are not tied to the cable company (Rogers or otherwise). You're pretty much in a "Doctor, it hurts when I do this" situation.
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And with DSL, your choice is...? Bell and Bell resellers? Some choice.
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I am so sick of hearing this typical comment from lazy people who are more than happy to spread their asscheeks and let Rogers and Bell frack them up the butt into the depths of their bowels instead of even considering an alternative. Does Bell get all the money you would pay for an account from a reseller? NO! So I would think that everyone that hates Bell or Rogers would be more than happy to drop them and switch to an ISP where a good chunk of your monthly bill goes into non-big-business pockets. But
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And switch to what, exactly?
They have a geographical monopoly across virtually all of Canada. If you live in an area serviced by them, you have a choice between Rogers and Rogers. Are you seriously asking people to give up entirely on the internet?
Your center of the universe attitude clearly proves that you live in Eastern Canada. First of all, Rogers does not have any presence in Western Canada - we have Shaw and TELUS. Second, Bell provides DSL in your area in direct competition t
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Here in Eastern Canada, we have Bell and Eastlink for internet, as well as Telus for Cell. Rogers isn't available in this area, either. I don't know WHERE this "Rogers Internet" is, but I suspect it's Ontario, which, as we all know, is like.. 99% of Canada, but only if you're FROM Ontario.
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So what. I am a Canadian and I use the American spelling rules like 'center' and 'color'. There is likely Americans down south who like to use British spelling conventions too even though they are American.
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There needs to be new blood in the ISP industry. I personally think we should have a nationwide government-run fiber network, just like any other public utility. Failing that, a wealthy thrill-seeking investor could do in a pinch. It's not exactly difficult to undercut the big boys, you just have to swallow the very costly barrier to entry. These monolithic 19th-century telcos simply don't have the flexibility to compete, and they all know it, which is why they never rock the boat...
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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.
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I don't think you can even get Rogers internet in Nova Scotia. There is a choice between Eastlink cable and Bell DSL, with a hodge podge of smaller places doing long haul wireless and such. Rogers DOES have cell phone "coverage" in this area, but it is laughably expensive and paltry coverage when compared to Bell or Telus's coverage.
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There needs to be a nationalized, government-run ISP. You guys up North should have learned from health care that big private corporations are only going to screw you in the end.
I'm surprised that Canada hasn't figured out that broadband internet needs to be run as a public utility.
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Why don't ISPs bill home users by the amount of bandwidth used so the users don't pay for the bandwidth they don't use?
Because users like simplified billing and a flat monthly rate - with no surprises on next month's bill.
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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.
The internet has evolved to a point where it is seen as a public utility. It should be offered, managed and subsidized like any other public utility. Governments build
Toll roads bill based on how far you go! At the le (Score:3, Informative)
Toll roads bill based on how far you go! At the least the ticket based ones do the other ones are gate based so the rate is not the same all over the same systems.
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Because bandwidth costs nothing! Or rather, it costs a fixed price in maintenance, plus an upfront investment.
Having people pay per usage is basically saying you can reasonably expect people to give you money for exactly nothing in return. That is not how the market is supposed to work...
Oh well, this is what happens when you have a combination of information asymmetry (dumb users) and a quasi-monopoly (rogers).
I use primus. No cap, and acceptable bandwidth. Too expensive compared to Europe, but what can I
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Bruce must have mod points.
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Oddly, where I live (Indian County) I pay a flat rate for water/sewer. The infrastructure is just getting installed to meter. I think I pay more than I should, and I may be. We'll find out when the meters and the billing software gets u
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I agree, but you may not like the delivered price. You can get b/w cheap at a peering point, but getting that to your home at the guaranteed bit-rate is not cheap. I know that the cost of last mile circuits in Canada is horrendous and that is where the reform really needs to start: Bell.
I live in the Seattle area and know that we host a lot of BC firms just because of that.
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Please, take a shot at our health-care, although we are finally seeing some positive movement there.
You often buy IP by the 95/5 rule, meter every 5 minutes and then throw out the top 5% of peaks and bill at the 95% point. That keeps quick flashes of very high traffic from killing you.
But buying a last mile circuit like an OC-3 or T3 you'll be paying for the whole thing all the time (renting a pipe.) Metro Ethernet networks (MAN) can be billed either way, depends on what the market will tolerate.
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You still have national elections there, right?
I never said it was going to be easy. I remember sneaking a partial T1 into Canada to a cable provider back in '95 (they had one customer on the US side, north of Spokane, and they back hauled it via the cable system.) just to get around the horrid telco T1 rates.
Canada is going to have to have a Internet Revolution and overhaul Rogers/Bell. I'm surprised you've put up with them for this long.