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Heavy web downloaders face broadband fees

got a letter from Rogers and it says if you have lite speed you can download 60gigs a month. I had 20 gigs a month mostly and if you exceed the limit you get charged $5.00 dollars a gig!!!


For extreme it is 95gig limit and the charge is $1-2 an extra gig.


It sucks, but I don't go anywhere near the limit and I download a lot of movies and games.
 
Now that we are addicted to the big pipe, our pusher wants to charge us more for a hit.

Classic move.
 
unimaginative2 said:
And why do you think Verizon would munificently choose to lower rates once they've bought out Bell? The goodness of their hearts? Even Milton Friedman and his ilk strongly believed in regulating collusion and anti-competitive practices by monopolies and oligopolies.
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Why do you instantly assume that no other foreign competitors would enter the market? The bottom line is, we've been protecting and cuddling this industry from competition for decades and all it's brought us is really bad service at the highest price in the world. What do we have to lose by opening up the market to foreigners? It surely can't get any worse than what we have now. Let's completely abolish all ownership restrictions and see how the market shakes out. We may very well end up with a natural oligopoly, and if we do, we can certainly place certain restrictions to prevent predatory behaviours. That said, somehow other countries have figured out how to have better service at competitive prices so it should certainly be feasible to replicate their tactics in Canada as well. Even one extra foreign competitor operating on a national scale would do wonders for our market. Of course, that should have been done 20 years ago, but it's better late than never. Had we acted then Bell and Rogers wouldn't have the same kind of advantage that they have today over new entrants. Banking is the next industry that could use a swift kick up its backside.
 
Blixtein said:
We need real deregulation. In other words, allow foreigners to own telecoms with no Cancon restrictions.
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I don't think that if a US firm were to take over a Canadian telecom giant that any increase in service would occur. The only foreign investor that would probably take over a Canadian company would be a US competitor, naturally, so there really is no reason to change the ownership IMO. It would be very bad if Verizon were to take over Bell or AT&T to take over Fido/Microcell/Rogers.
 
I do agree. The only thing worse than Rogers would be AT&T Canada or RogersTimeWarner. The CRTC should have encouraged another player, foreign backed or not, to come in fresh. It has so much discretionary power that it could block a foreign takeover of one of the three members of the oligopoly if it turned out that way.

There's no logic to the CRTC anyway, so it could do whatever it or its political masters chose.
 
There are alternatives to Bell and Rogers. Primus has good options and their internet still has usenet news which Bell and Rogers control freaks got rid of long ago. In addition their cell network runs on Rogers towers so the service is obviously comparable and the price is lower. People need to be willing to choose options other than Rogers and Bell if they expect those two companies to behave differently.
 
SeanTrans said:
I do agree. The only thing worse than Rogers would be AT&T Canada or RogersTimeWarner. The CRTC should have encouraged another player, foreign backed or not, to come in fresh. It has so much discretionary power that it could block a foreign takeover of one of the three members of the oligopoly if it turned out that way.

There's no logic to the CRTC anyway, so it could do whatever it or its political masters chose.
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Especially considering net throttling STARTED in the United States by the big providers there. Comcast has had lots of service problems, I used to work for them in the past in high speed internet services, and between the various phone giants and Comcast I assure you no service quality increases would result in a US takeover.

I've seen Comcast's quality from an inside perspective. We actually had a BellSouth link for our business purposes at the service centre I worked at (ironic, yes LOL). You could take a bittorrent file on an 8Mbps advertised Comcast connection, and with all proper port forwarding and firewalls disabled, you'd find a file downloading at 25KB/sec, yet on BellSouth's connection that was actually slower (rated at 3 or 6 Mbps) I saw an identical file downloading on a different system at the same time at 250KB/sec.

The first thing a TimeWarner or Comcast takeover of Rogers that would happen is huge amounts of Canadian jobs would be cut in a major reorganization. They would then blend the service centers and servicing products into one brand, and as a corporation, try to do more with fewer employees. Your wait times for service would go up, the quality level would go down, and if any history here is a note for the future prices would actually increase in the long term anyway.

A buyout is simply bad for Canada.

Years after a buyout you'd find a large US based corporation lobbying Ottawa to change the law so they can replace any existing Canadian content and Canadian TV with all US brands in terms of TV content. The argument, as its always characterized, is free trade and freedom, freedom, freedom. Evil government regulation just getting in the way... Its always the argument coming from a monopoly or duopoly or whatever. The real question is freedom for who? Freedom for the individuals of a given nation, or freedom only for the corporation?

The CRTC has the power to regulate and to advise the current Canadian providers where will exists to do so, so why give up that soverignty just for no reason?
 
EnviroTO said:
There are alternatives to Bell and Rogers. Primus has good options and their internet still has usenet news which Bell and Rogers control freaks got rid of long ago. In addition their cell network runs on Rogers towers so the service is obviously comparable and the price is lower. People need to be willing to choose options other than Rogers and Bell if they expect those two companies to behave differently.
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There are plenty of options. I am likely to move to one of them after getting screwed by a Tech. Support dude last month at Sympatico. I've heard and read great things about one provider in particular, you can PM me if you want to know which one.

Search here - http://www.canadianisp.com/cgi-bin/ispsearch.cgi?f=Search&p=ON
 
Last month I had 450gb of data transfer when Rogers grants me a whopping 60gb. I've always been a good bit torrent user and gave back more than I've downloaded to maintain good ratios and be a good internet citizen in general.

Now that Rogers has gone on record stating the party is over June 1st I plan on getting my money's worth, we're talking several TB per month, along with my cancellation notice effective June 1st as I will be switching to Acanac who have no such silly download restrictions.

My next step to rid myself of this evil empire known as Rogers is to get away from their horrible HD service, if rumours are true Rogers will soon be going the way of Comcast by severely compressing HD signals so they can squeeze more HD channels. Normally increasing service is a good thing, but the picture quality loss would be dramatic, all so Rogers can SELL us more channels.

The general public should be furious at Rogers, the problem is that people just aren't educated well enough to understand how ass-backwards everything they do is in this market. We are entering an age of digital media and Rogers is clearly jumping in on this as a chance to cash-in rather than upgrade their networks and deliver a better end-user experience, instead it's a case of lets rape them for every damn penny they have.
 
450GB in one month?
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I already spoke with Acanac, they advised this isn't considered abuse.

My use is about on par with most of my friends. I don't know how anyone can pay all this money for a service and not be pushing 100gb/month. Look at the size of a dvd and consider you should be uploading just as much as you're downloading and you'll see how quickly 450gb goes. I'm actually at 300gb now according to Rogers which is funny because my billing cycle started on April 4th. I'm well on my way to shattering whatever type of use record they have for my account type, woohoo. I admit I am blatently abusing my service THIS MONTH but that's only in protest of Rogers actions, it's mostly pure uploading and giving back, I will continue to do so until June 1st.

Don't even bother making the argument that it's users like me that are causing Rogers to take these actions, they have more than enough capacity, it doesn't cost them an extra cent to accomodate me, they're just trying to squeeze every penny they can out of every customer, if you think otherwise you're a fool.
 
wonderboy416 said:
consider you should be uploading just as much as you're downloading
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Why?

Don't even bother making the argument that it's users like me that are causing Rogers to take these actions, they have more than enough capacity, it doesn't cost them an extra cent to accomodate me, they're just trying to squeeze every penny they can out of every customer, if you think otherwise you're a fool.
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I must admit, I am curious. How much capacity do they have?
 
Bell Canada - ringing in the spins

Interesting, as far as cost - it depends....

At Teksavvy they give you two choices of which pipes they send you out to the internet (they have 5 Gig-E pipes I believe that is a Gbps), one is through a Peer1 pipe (which they charge around $30/month and have a cap of 200 GB) - each extra 100GB you can buy at around $10 (so it probably costs them $3 - $5), or they can send you through Cogent - which has no cap (at around $40/month). The difference is the latency - which is slightly higher on Cogent - so if you do 300GB or less then go with the $30/month and buy the extra 100GB.

Bell/Rogers pricing serves two functions.... a cash grab and to restrict competition against their VOD products.
 
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