Rogers Internet Service to Start Charging Customers for Excessive Bandwidth Use

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Posted by Nicolas Oliver on Apr-17-2008 16:23:

Rogers Internet Service to Start Charging Customers for Excessive Bandwidth Use

This news is a few weeks (one month-plus?) old but I learned about it only today and, so, perhaps some other Rogers customers may still be unaware.

Essentially, starting June 1, 2008 Rogers will begin charging its customers a fee when the latter use more than a specified amount of monthly bandwidth. For instance, their 'Express' plan will permit users to use a total of 60Gb per month without penalty; however, for every additional Gb that is used, customers will be billed $2.00 (if I remember correctly) per Gb. Rogers has setup a service on their website that allows users to check regularly how much bandwidth they have used in the month (24hrs behind real time) (see here for the tool). Users can take one of three actions in response to this new policy: 1) ensure they do not exceed the alloted bandwidth or 2) pay the penalty for additional use or 3) upgrade their service. With respect to the last option, an 'Express' user, for instance, can pay $10.00 more per month to upgrade to the 'Extreme' service which i) increases the transfer rate from 7mb/s to 10mb/s and, more importantly, ii) increases the amount of 'free' bandwidth from 60gb to 95gb.

Until the 1st of June users can continue to download/upload as much as they like without penalty.

Posted by devnull on Apr-17-2008 16:49:

Bell has been charging people already and offer an "insurance" for a fee so you dont get nagged with a big fee if you go over.

Bell packages are still way too expensive.

Im on cogeco, small business acct, with 120GB quota. At 5gb over, they send u a warning. At 10gb they disconnect you for a few hours...and at 15% over, its 1 day suspension with 1GB data for the rest of the month.
The price is good tho, $60 for 120GB.. 800kb/s down maximum

Whats rogers price for the extreme?

Posted by urban_legend on Apr-17-2008 16:49:

My questions unless your illegally downloading TV shows or movies how are people going over this?

They say that 10 percent of users use 90 percent of the bandwidth.

I am ok with them doing this.

Posted by exstasie on Apr-17-2008 17:08:

quote:
Originally posted by urban_legend
My questions unless your illegally downloading TV shows or movies how are people going over this?

They say that 10 percent of users use 90 percent of the bandwidth.
I am ok with them doing this.

Well thats the point I think.

I downloaded/uploaded 15GB worth of stuff last night
So..i need to be more careful.

But also, people who use Skype a lot need to be careful of how much bandwidth it actually uses.

At York University in residences, I think we were allowed 20GB of bandwidth per week, and a lot of ppl were banned unknowingly because they had Skype continousouly running in the background. Samething for P2P connections where ppl upload off of a you...

Posted by matty on Apr-17-2008 18:02:

I've been charged and extra $30 for the last 3 months with Bell for going over the limit. And i rarely download movies. Didn't realize that Skype uses that much bandwidth

Posted by Jayx1 on Apr-17-2008 18:36:

so much for "unlimited"!

Posted by hazelnut on Apr-17-2008 18:37:

bahh i got a warning for going over the limit...

Posted by VERTiG0 on Apr-17-2008 18:51:

http://www.bwmonitor.com/

I use that, it's a great program. Realtime monitoring of all used bandwidth through different periods of time.

Anyway, I use at least 5-8GB per day just cruising around and listening to Digitally Imported. I rarely download anymore, and even though I can't torrent Linux ISOs (hah) anymore, I'm still going to get screwed on this.

Posted by Silky Johnson on Apr-17-2008 18:57:

Didn't they always do this? I thought I remembered reading it on their website last year when I was considering switching to Bell and comparing rates.

Posted by Jem_hadar on Apr-17-2008 19:11:

quote:
Originally posted by VERTiG0
http://www.bwmonitor.com/

Anyway, I use at least 5-8GB per day just cruising around and listening to Digitally Imported.

I was just gonna ask, say if I were to stream DI.fm (64bit is it i think? the free one...?) or 2hp.ca (128bit) all afternoon and night while sleeping (say 5pm when off work, till 8am waking up in the morning.... so 15 hours)

Whats that likley to eat up?

Shit... if I have to become conscious of streaming music only, thats gonna be REAL annoying.

I rarely DL much these days otherwise. The odd techno sets off here... maybe a new TV show ep of House once a week. C'est tout.

Posted by Swamper on Apr-17-2008 19:18:

quote:
Originally posted by Jem_hadar
I was just gonna ask, say if I were to stream DI.fm (64bit is it i think? the free one...?) or 2hp.ca (128bit) all afternoon and night while sleeping (say 5pm when off work, till 8am waking up in the morning.... so 15 hours)

assuming listening to a 128 bit stream 24/7 = 128,000 bits/8 = 16 kBytes/sec usage * 86400 seconds = 1382.4 gigs a day of usage ~= 41.4 gigs a month of usage

(and for you uber nerds don't come at me with 1kb = 1024 bytes not 1000 bytes since that doesn't affect the calculation much)

Posted by LKD on Apr-17-2008 19:28:

got it in the mail a few weeks ago...share the net with 3 other roomies... only 1 month in 4 accounted in their report did we exceed so who knows...

might have to switch to acanac

Posted by devnull on Apr-17-2008 19:29:

quote:
Originally posted by Jayx1
so much for "unlimited"!

that was a scam to get pple in the door and fuck em in the behind once they go over their not so unlimited rates

Posted by kotsy on Apr-17-2008 20:33:

Will they even offer an unlimited bandwidth account above extreme or no?

Posted by Jem_hadar on Apr-17-2008 21:20:

quote:
Originally posted by kotsy
Will they even offer an unlimited bandwidth account above extreme or no?

Doubt it.

Posted by VERTiG0 on Apr-17-2008 21:34:

quote:
Originally posted by El K Dee
got it in the mail a few weeks ago...share the net with 3 other roomies... only 1 month in 4 accounted in their report did we exceed so who knows...

might have to switch to acanac

Don't bother, Bell owns those lines and they can shit all over them too, even metering

Posted by LKD on Apr-17-2008 21:38:

quote:
Originally posted by VERTiG0
Don't bother, Bell owns those lines and they can shit all over them too, even metering

really now....dammit...so is there ANY ISP that will provide Internet without a bandwidth cap?

Posted by VERTiG0 on Apr-17-2008 22:06:

quote:
Originally posted by El K Dee
really now....dammit...so is there ANY ISP that will provide Internet without a bandwidth cap?

Nope, not anymore.

Posted by Dj Gracjan on Apr-17-2008 22:14:

quote:
Originally posted by hazelnut
bahh i got a warning for going over the limit...

i got one of those not too long ago either. oh well

Posted by DigiNut on Apr-17-2008 22:27:

I don't remember what it is, but in the update they sent me it appears that there's actually a cap to the cap. That is, they'll charge you for excessive bandwidth, but up to a maximum of $30 or $50 or something.

Doesn't say what they do afterwards. I assume they just let it slide but maybe they disconnect you if you go higher.

Posted by VERTiG0 on Apr-17-2008 23:11:

quote:
Originally posted by DigiNut
I don't remember what it is, but in the update they sent me it appears that there's actually a cap to the cap. That is, they'll charge you for excessive bandwidth, but up to a maximum of $30 or $50 or something.

Doesn't say what they do afterwards. I assume they just let it slide but maybe they disconnect you if you go higher.

It's up to $25 extra.

So if you're fine with a $75 internet bill for pretty much unlimited, then likely being totally cut off after 2 months for "excessive usage," go nuts!

Posted by Orko on Apr-17-2008 23:16:

quote:
Originally posted by urban_legend
My questions unless your illegally downloading TV shows or movies how are people going over this?

They say that 10 percent of users use 90 percent of the bandwidth.

I am ok with them doing this.

New web pages use a lot of bandwidth. Youtube, flikr, facebook. The new internet is not text, it is media, legal and illegal.

I can do at least 100gigs/month on live sets alone. Add to that all the research, youtube, and pics I download, its easy to go over those limits.

Files are only getting bigger and our internet plans are only getting more restrictive.

The real motivation behind the excessive charges is not for bandwidth, but for you to buy more media products from media companies. Rogers and Bell fully realise that the internet is the best content delivery system ever invented, but they want you to buy their set top boxes instead. If excessive usage was the real issue, this policy would have been put in place more than five years go.

Excessive downloads have always been there and will always be there. They are not the reason the internet is 'clogged'. Usenet, FTP, IRC...these are technologies have been around a long time, and continue to be used a lot. The same people using torrents today are the same ones that used the older technologies years ago.

The funnies thing is that statistic of 10% of users using 90% of the bandwidth. I've seen studies that say as many as 80% of 'young' people use torrents and p2p. The term young is really anybody under 40. Thats a huge percentage of the population, and there for it cannot be only 10% of people using all that bandwidth. If that much of your customer base is actually using torrents and p2p, maybe that is what they should be allowed to do? The market is supposed to dictate what services are offered and for what prices, but this is a case of the big guy saying NO. Buy our products in this nice neat little package, because we did not think of using the internet first.

Posted by Orko on Apr-17-2008 23:19:

quote:
Originally posted by VERTiG0
Don't bother, Bell owns those lines and they can shit all over them too, even metering

quote:
Originally posted by El K Dee
really now....dammit...so is there ANY ISP that will provide Internet without a bandwidth cap?

Not true, as I am with Acanac. Yes, my torrents are throttled during the day, but Acanac will not charge me, it is unlimited.

I just did 250GB (combined) last month, and am on route doing something similar this month. I have even spoken to the Acanac admins, and they are just fine with the amount of data their users go through. Funny thing is that they checked their usage, and since Bell started throttling their customers, they have not seen a noticeable drop in bandwidth usage.

Posted by VERTiG0 on Apr-17-2008 23:21:

quote:
Originally posted by Orko
Not true, as I am with Acanac. Yes, my torrents are throttled during the day, but Acanac will not charge me, it is unlimited.

I just did 250GB (combined) last month, and am on route doing something similar this month. I have even spoken to the Acanac admins, and they are just fine with the amount of data their users go through. Funny thing is that they checked their usage, and since Bell started throttling their customers, they have not seen a noticeable drop in bandwidth usage.

Ah, I read on DSL Reports that some guy was bitching about his stuff being metered on Acanac now as well because of Bell's new policies.

Posted by Orko on Apr-17-2008 23:24:

quote:
Originally posted by VERTiG0
Ah, I read on DSL Reports that some guy was bitching about his stuff being metered on Acanac now as well because of Bell's new policies.

Ah...don't know. I am on Acanac's forums all the time, and they do not remove any posts, and the Admins are on there keeping us informed. Sure there are technical problems, but nothing related to bandwidth.

Trust me, if there was a bandwidth problem, I would be the first one they contact.

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