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Rogers Shrinks Download Limits As Netflix Arrives
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."
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?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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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.
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.
Yeah, and Aurora is... owned by Rogers. Look at http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/February2008/13/c9876.html
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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 avalanche has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." - Kosh
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, and that it will lose another fifteen percent 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.
~Idarubicin