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."

Comments

Re:You Know

[rhizome]

And switch to what, exactly?

DSL. If you can't live without cable modem, then that's the choice you've made. Those with more flexible connectivity criteria have more options and are not tied to the cable company (Rogers or otherwise). You're pretty much in a "Doctor, it hurts when I do this" situation.

The cost of bandwidth

[thue]

We buy a raw 100Mbit/100Mbit Internet connection with guarantied bandwidth for 1300 US$/month. We haven't renegotiated that price in a while, but I hear that bandwidth prices have been falling very fast since then. A big ISP would probably get bandwidth cheaper still.

Our current price works out to 25GB/$ if we use it 100% 24/7. So if you are paying more than 15/25=60cents for our Internet connection limited to 15GB/month, then you are being cheated.

I really don't get why Internet connection limits are so often so low. The fraction of the price you pay which actually goes to cover Internet bandwidth costs in a normal Internet connection is miniscule.

Re:The cost of bandwidth

[cgenman]

Internet connections are grossly oversold. I worked in an ISP once, where the upstream we had was sufficient to cover ONE full-use customer. At any given time, there were 50 online. Because of how people used the connections (net surfing, checking e-mail) the burst was fine. But anyone who tried a sustained transfer was getting garbage. And there were times of day when even the bursty nature of customer usage was too much, and the network was dogg-slow. Of course, we blamed it on DSL routing and old telephone lines. But the fact was the last mile was owned by a telco who re-sold bulk access to us for more than they charged customers directly. So we had to charge as little as possible (which was always more than them, of course), and set up with as small of an overhead buffer as possible.

ISP's are just expensive. Customer service people don't come cheap, compared to how much people pay (if net on each customer is $10 a month, a minimum of 500 customers' worth of income just goes to one person to handle all of the phone calls. With 500 customers, there will be 5 or so that demand attention every hour of every waking bloody day. Add in actual engineers, advertising, the shrinking revenue base... it's tough. One big corner that basically has to be cut is upstream. The question is how deeply you cut. And when you're looking at cutting back something many people wouldn't notice, or cutting your own salary to shreds, most people go for the former.

Re:The cost of bandwidth

[msimion]

I'm in Romania and I pay ~15 USD for cable, land phone line and a 50MBits internet connection (no limits whatsoever). Depending on peer's upload bandwith I can go up to 1-3 Mbytes (not MBits) while downloading stuff. Some would call this service tri-play. Aren't such services available in .ca or .us ?

Re:The cost of bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

HOLY CRAP, wtf are you saying? That is literally INSANE. I get 100/100 for 40$. Im from Sweden, but I remember some US big shot saying that they are not that far behind. Bullshit.

Re:The cost of bandwidth

[Goateee]

Last I checked, Canada was not a state of the US. Am from Sweden too, unlimited 100/100+tv+phone+mobile internet for 45$ :)

15GB limit? Thats like what, a few hours of HQ youtube? Am using upwards of a TB a month, and would be really sad if they had placed any kind of cap.

Re:The cost of bandwidth

[thue]

-And they wouldn't complain if you used it 100% 24/7?
-And you are guarantied to always have 100Mbit available?
-And you are allowed to use the line for whatever you want, including reselling?

We share the line between 238 apartments. Which works out to less $10, for what is effectively almost always 100/100Mbit (I bet your line is also oversubscribed at your internet provider). So actually, our cost is 1/4 of yours :).

...And Rogers rents movies, too

[fudoniten]

You failed to mention that Rogers Video is one of the largest chains of movie rental shops in Canada. That's what makes this an especially weird coincidence.

At one point, I couldn't get a cell phone from Rogers the telco, apparently because I owed some late fees to Rogers the movie rental shop, which I could only pay at the movie shop. So I went with another telco. Weird, anyway; I hadn't realized they were all so tightly connected.

Re:Why is overflow so expensive?

[billcopc]

Dude, they punish and blackmail EVERY TIER. My internet bill is about $120 because I am one of those who consistently uses more than 95gb per month. According to Rogers, people who use that kind of bandwidth can only be evil pirates. According to my own traffic logs, I am a geek who really values offsite backups, remote desktop access and ferrying new content to/from my web server somewhere in Seattle.

Rogers is ass, but they're the lesser of several evils up here. Bell's network conks out on a daily basis, even when it's up the speed is pathetic and latency is worse than my old 9600 baud. All the other "ISPs" are Bell resellers, cheaper but equally fucked - even the legendary TekSavvy is at the mercy of Bell's colonary spasms.

And I have yet to hear any word about residential fiber up here. What Bell calls "Fibe" is just ADSL 2 and the fiber terminates at the DSLAM, like it has for 15 years.

What do I want ? Simple. I want a 100mbit shared line in my building. They call this place "Silicon Valley North", well then where's my fucking pipe ?

If I guess by the number of WiFi networks I've scanned, at least 25 tenants have broadband in my building alone. Now being a sysadmin, I know a thing or two about fiber, and I know that 25 times $50 a month is enough to bring a 100mb line here. With a bit of infrastructure, that could be aggregated up to a gbit line to service a few city blocks. It's certainly more bandwidth than Rogers is providing us.

Re:Ummmm. Ouch

[stretch0611]

Comcast's 250gb cap is reasonable? No it isn't, it is just a way for them to avoid investing more money in building their network and in addition protect their own movie service.

Between downloading patches, linux distros, and porn along with working from home connecting to remote machines, I have come up against that limit without netflix or any other movie streaming. (And this is all legal activity with bit torrent only being used for linux distros.)

Now if you add to that netflix or some other provider, add an additional tv or two, how much bandwidth can a family of four people use? They can easily break the 250GB barrier. (I did it alone.)

And this is today... in the future we will be expecting lossless HD video, video calling, and sharing home movies with friends and relatives instead of just pictures. Online games are just going to require more and more bandwidth and who knows how much bandwidth the next killer app will use or how addicted the next bunch of morons will be to the website that eventually slays facebook.

Comcast and all the others want to protect their monopolies (or duopolies as appropriate) and to increase their profit margins with the least bit of effort. The cost of bandwidth is in building it, it does not cost more to transfer extra bits over the network.

Re:Why is overflow so expensive?

[Charliemopps]

The last mile is ALWAYS saturated. I've been working in the telcom industry for 15years now and watch from the inception of the internet until now. Back in the day it would have been unheard of to oversell a remote, but now it's almost sick what the industry will pull. I've worked for 3 phone companies and they all do the same crap. They'll have 50 people fed out of a remote, they'll sell 5meg connections to most of those people and then the remote will be fed by 2 or 3 T1s. There isn't a SINGLE customer in the remote that can get what they paid for... not a single one!! Then those T1's lead back to the CO, where hundreds more meet and is fed to a backbone that is, yet again, woefully under provisioned. When customers call and complain that they went to some speed test site and they are getting 500k or 1mb instead of their 5mb or 10mb they are paying for, the staff that answer the phone have to read off a script that states they can not guarantee the results from 3rd party sites... who knows whats wrong with those websites right? But oh wait, your ISP has their own speed test site! How great... but guess what, every router from you to that speed test site is QOS's to that IP address, and the website itself is hosted on the ISPs own backbone. Holy crap I hit 4 MB!! Wait... I'm paying for 5... So now the sales contracts have changed... you're not paying for 5mb, you're paying for "Up to 5mb!" yay! "We're upgrading you from your 2mb connection to our new "Up to 5mb!" but oh wait... you never even got 1mb all these years, and that hasn't changed.

Re:Why is overflow so expensive?

[MoonBuggy]

In that case it sounds like there's a gap in the market waiting to be filled, and that means profit to be made. You could be the guy making that profit, not to mention getting the connection you wanted in the first place. It'll take a bit of work, but giving the middle finger to the entrenched pseudo-monopolies could be a rather satisfying way for a geek to make a living!

Former Rogers employee

[failedlogic]

(sorry for length, hope this might be helpful, probably overstaing obvious, anyways.....)

I don't want to bash Rogers, they paid me a good salary and I had a great experience working there many years ago.

I'm far removed from the company now, but I *think* and it appears marketing/management strategy remains unchanged.

My experience though in sales has been that the marketing and upper management has some strange way of making promotions and changing products for better (and unfortunately) worse. Most of the promotions are pretty positive and get a lot of new customers and sales for cable, PPV, specialty channels and Internet. This new download cap probably won't be a problem since most customers don't use or understand the Internet much. I'll bet most are just check e-mail and news and won't even use close to 15 GB. I'd be more concerned if I were a parent. Kids with an XBox 360 or PS3, what with downloading patches, playing online, demos and Torrent, Netflix, Youtube, blah blah blah. The parents don't use the net much, but the kids you can't control and the kids and parents probably don't realize how much is being downloaded.

I makes no sense to me that it would cost the ISP (Rogers) more for bandwidth as time goes on. I would think bandwidth costs would decrease and extra services like mail servers (a lot use Gmail, hotmail), news servers are no more, and I would think less people have 'homepages'.

Rogers is not unlike Bell, Shaw and to the US neighbors AT&T and Sprint etc in that they like any company wanting to make a profit and draw people away from competitors. Bell also has TV/Satellite offerings. So given industry trends, I won't be surprised if this bandwidth change is directly related to a conflict of interest, one they know the CRTC won't touch or are too slow to move.

I live in Vancouver, so I've also the opportunity as with Ontario and Quebec residents, to be a TekSavvy customer. It costs me more with a dry line, but well worth escaping the Telus or Shaw. Bonus - they are more than generous with bandwidth. I'm happy with service - as long as Telus doesn't start pissing me off by trying to get the useless CRTC to cap non Telus DSL subscribers on their loop. As taxpayers, we've more than subsided the Ma Bells - to the point these should probably be considered public infrastructure.

Re:Yes it is

[mr_walrus]

i wish i could get business class line from Rogers.
but the wont provide the service to any area not zoned commercial/retail/industrial by the local municipality. :(

Re:Two plans changed

[emj]

I pay 46 $CAD per month for 100/100 with no cap, you are being cheated..

Re:You Know

[oogoliegoogolie]

I am so sick of hearing this typical comment from lazy people who are more than happy to spread their asscheeks and let Rogers and Bell frack them up the butt into the depths of their bowels instead of even considering an alternative. Does Bell get all the money you would pay for an account from a reseller? NO! So I would think that everyone that hates Bell or Rogers would be more than happy to drop them and switch to an ISP where a good chunk of your monthly bill goes into non-big-business pockets. But alas, it's always easier to sit, do nothing, and complain instead of taking action.

I live in a city with a population of less than 1M and we have at least half a dozen choices for DSL. If you don't want to switch from crappy rogers, or from bell to a reseller where only a portion goes to Bell instead of everything then that's your choice, not Rogers', not Bell's, so shut up and deal with your decision, or lack of.

There are some areas where Bell or Rogers are the only choice for hi-speed; if you are in that situation then I feel your pain and your complaints are then justified.