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Rogers Shrinks Download Limits As Netflix Arrives

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-very-canuckian-of-them dept.

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."

7 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Why is overflow so expensive? by Manip · · Score: 4, 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.

    1. Re:Why is overflow so expensive? by arekq · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The third party ISPs are not exactly Bell resellers.
      Their rent the ADSL connection from Bell but they have their own network and upstream providers.
      Having said that, yes, the ADSL scene is not looking good in Canada.
      The third party ISPs are not getting the faster ADSL2 service, and the fucking CRTC passed UBB to give even more power to Bell to screw customer and third party providers.
      I'll still choose third party ISPs, though. They still provide better service, and even though it looks like a losing battle, I think it's good to have someone to keep fighting against Bell.

  2. Ummmm. Ouch by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, 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.

    1. Re:Ummmm. Ouch by Fumus · · Score: 4, 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.

  3. Expect to see more of this... by One+Louder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is just the opening shot in the upcoming battle between cable providers that want you to use *their* on-demand movie systems vs Netflix and similar companies. It's not surprising it happened with Rogers first, but this will inevitably happen in the US too. Netflix's streaming of movies is the residential ISP's worst nightmare come true. They'll be in a position where they have to tell their customers that something they used to be able to do for no additional cost will suddenly become a new confusing expense showing up on their cable bill with no apparent additional benefit to the customer.

  4. And a big marketting push to Rogers on Demand by crispytwo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At the same time, they are pushing their Rogers on Demand service to all their customers too. http://www.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.

  5. Rogers vs. Netflix by nuckfuts · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Rogers not only has bandwidth concerns. They also operate a chain of movie rental stores. Netflix poses a dual threat to Rogers.