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.
Apr-17-2008 16:23
devnull
Supreme tranceaddict
Registered: Feb 2006
Location:
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?
Apr-17-2008 16:49
urban_legend
Original Hammer Crew
Registered: Sep 2006
Location: Canada
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.
___________________
Marco V is the MAN!!!!!
Apr-17-2008 16:49
exstasie
Hack Attack
Registered: Jun 2006
Location: Toronto/Sauga, Canada
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...
___________________
"I'm not stoned...I'm just Asian!"
Apr-17-2008 17:08
matty
08/09 National Beach Cham
Registered: Jun 2003
Location: back in T.O
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
Apr-17-2008 18:02
Jayx1
Prime Minister of TOTA
Registered: Feb 2003
Location: The Socialist People's Republic Of Canada
so much for "unlimited"!
Apr-17-2008 18:36
hazelnut
tranceaddict
Registered: Feb 2007
Location: Toronto, Canada
bahh i got a warning for going over the limit...
Apr-17-2008 18:37
VERTiG0
cunning linguist.
Registered: Dec 2003
Location: no longer Cambridge, Ontario, Canada
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.
Apr-17-2008 18:51
Silky Johnson
International Playa Hater
Registered: Nov 2003
Location:
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.
Apr-17-2008 18:57
Jem_hadar
I remember...
Registered: Nov 2003
Location: Pandora (South of Nowhere)
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.
___________________
TECHNO IS THE BEST NOISE ON EARTH.
Save Techno - Stop Minimal / Tech-House
Apr-17-2008 19:11
Swamper
Webmonstah
Registered: Jan 2000
Location: Toronto, Canada
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)
___________________
"In a world of illusion you only see what you feel"
Apr-17-2008 19:18
LKD
Omni-peasant
Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Its June 18th, 2005, I'm at the Skybar
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...
