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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.
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.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
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.