Rogers users last week were delivered letters indicating the provider’s intent to start implementing usage caps of 60GB and 95GB for the two standard tiers, Express and Extreme. Their misinformation site contains some interesting usage calculations, but essentially muddies the waters by describing activities in an “or” context: for example, you could download 24 high-definition videos (at about 4GB each) OR download 24,300 songs.
I’m admittedly surprised at their references to BitTorrent and high-definition movie downloads, but frankly that’s what their target audience is with this particular site: heavy users that they hope to coerce into keeping under a specific 95GB point.
The problem for consumers with this approach is that it’s no longer just the top 10% of users being targetted – a 95GB cap means that the top 10% of users will be using close to that amount, and it would be trivial for the ISP to reduce the figure in the future, even as more bandwidth intensive applications emerge.
Good news, though: extra bandwidth usage charges top out at $25 extra per month, which is a fee I’ll likely be paying part of every month upon my next move. (I also have full intent to purchase a TekSavvy unlimited account as well.)
From a network management perspective, I understand the need to keep subscribers and abusers of the service under control. There have always been provisions in every Internet contract for disconnecting people based on overuse, even back when dialup connections were standard. I’m irked that something previously touted as “unlimited” has gotten to the point where a hard cap and extra charges are necessary. Having heavy users on your network comes with the territory of having users like Granny checking her email once a week.
Rogers injects a usage frame into a webpage.Admittedly, my Internet usage patterns tend to encompass newsgroup downloading and hefty SCP/SFTP transfers – on a regular basis working for IBM, I’d have to prop the latest Eclipse builds from Ottawa down the home line. Combined with the rest of the mandatory software suite, the nightly package could be 5GB.
One thing that will be interesting to see is Rogers’ deep packet inspection and rewriting – the usage message that caused issue back in December. They have an example image shown on one of their magazine property websites.
As soon as they start to insert HTML arbitrarily into webpages, that’s where they’ve crossed the line.
Are you going to change your internet usage patterns as a result of these developments? How much bandwidth are you using on a monthly basis?
Comments are closed.