Just completed a survey for Rogers in which they asked many questions about reactions to limiting bandwith (with average monthly use stated to be around 5 GB). I always worry when I see questions like this because if they don't get enough negative reaction up front, we might see such limits soon.

I know there are currently limits (mine is 60 GB /month) and you pay for going over (I don't think I have ever come close) but if the limits get lowered, the number of people effected by it will grow exponentially.

My personal view is that setting up a download limit does nothing but help Rogers bottom line - how does the fact that heavy users will have to pay more money to Rogers help out other users who MIGHT experience slow downs? The better solution might be for Rogers to continue to upgrade and improve its service. Another "wonky" idea might be for customers to pay per GB (i.e. the service is not $46/month, but rather $X/GB and billed monthly). Rogers wouldn't like that because it wouldn't give them the guaranteed income every month that they get from fixed monthly fees.

For all the complaints and gripping, I don't really want to leave Rogers but I would be the first to look for an alternative (if one will exist in the land of the monopolies) that didn't overly restrict my internet use.

Caps are often discussed here. The reality is that all ISP's are going from an all you can eat to pay for what you eat model.

Frankly I like the idea of one speed for everyone and you pay by the GB. Longer term, high speed service would be priced like Long distance plans where you pay by the GB or buy internet plans. (10GB for $10)

I think a fair way of doing it would be to charge a fixed rate per month with a capped download; 10 or 20 gig would seem fair. Go over and you pay dearly for it.

The current problem is that many people are DL'ing torrents every day, all day and consuming lots of bandwidth. Since most new torrent clients are encrypting the data, Rogers can't determine what the traffic is. As a result, they've decided to shape the bandwidth on all traffic. I like to DL a few torrents a month and these are usually a TV show I've missed (usually because my Bell 9200 dropped the show) but it's very frustrating that it takes a few hours to grab a single show. A year ago, I could get a 1 hour show in less than an hour.

Overall, companies who want to compete in the ISP game should be prepared to offer the service and meet the demands of the user. More and more content is being made available and these guys better be prepared.

Congo

I'll address 2 posts in one message...
Frankly I like the idea of one speed for everyone and you pay by the GB. Longer term, high speed service would be priced like Long distance plans where you pay by the GB or buy internet plans. (10GB for $10)

Overall, companies who want to compete in the ISP game should be prepared to offer the service and meet the demands of the user. More and more content is being made available and these guys better be prepared.

I think Rogers' problem isn't so much total gigabytes as peak demand, sort of like the problems that electrical urilities face during the summer peak demand. There are a couple of ways to handle it,,,

Charge more for peak-period use than for off-peak use. The airline industry has done this for years. Some of the more advanced electrical utilities do this with timed metering. The "late great IStop" ISP, which I was a customer of, at one point did this. Usage from sessions which started after 2:00 AM, and ended before 8:00 AM (the same day;) ) did not count to your monthly quota.
Offer customers lower-speed service, for a lower price (going against Hugh's idea here). 32 customers running flat out at 256 kbits use the same peak bandwidth as 1 customer running flat out at 8 megabits. Electricity is not possible to use 4 hours at 25 watts, and light up a 100 watt bulb at full brightness for 1 hour. However, if you're updating your system (Windows/linux/whatever), dragging out the download into an overnight session is perfectly OK. It spreads out the demand on Rogers' peak bandwidth.

My ADSL service is capped to 2496 kbits, due to line limits. For a year or so, I got away with 3 megabits, before noise started causing my connection to drop. The extra speed didn't make any real difference when surfing. Web pages loaded just as slowly, thanks to HTML code that delayed page display until an overloaded third-party banner-ad-server pushed its ad out the door. Streaming internet radio comes through at the same speed while I sit here typing. The only time I can measure any real-life difference is when a Gentoo update includes a new kernel, or a new version of Firefox (fresh download, not a patch file or two) AND I hit a lightly-loaded server that can crank out 300+ kbytes/sec.

The tarballs are over 30 megabytes, and even then, the download time is secondary. Gentoo now has a "parallel-fetch" option that downloads packages in the background, while another job is compiling an updated package that has just been downloaded.

Charge more for peak-period use than for off-peak use.

And that is very much the old LD model where you could call cheaper after hours.

Offer customers lower-speed service, for a lower price

Well we have that today.

I don't disagree with either your suggestions because they are both against the old unlimited downloads at one price.

The point is that heavy-users or peak-users need to pay more and shouldn't be subsidized by the lighter users.

I've always thought selective throttling could be employed and applied to a subscribers modem where they have exceeded the monthly quota.

But I have to agree that lowering the quota and charging for overages ensures that the heavy users are paying their share.

I'd like to see packages where I can select speed and transfer quota. As a relatively light user, I'd pay to get the top speed, but could probably live with a 10GB monthly download limit.

Rogers sent me a questionaire last week about limiting bandwidth to 5G/mo. Seems they're concerned about video downloads choking their pipes.

I suggested charging a premium for 5G+ instead of a hard limit, but got the impression they're not thinking along that line.

Anyone know what's up?

Thanks,
John

5 gigs/mo is a joke. If they implement this without decreasing prices I'll be heading elsewhere.

I fully agree that the major problem is peak use. Rogers should be able to allow customers to queue large downloads for off-peak activation and a significant discount.

Problem is, much of the downloading is done by kids who never see the bill and their parents who will keep paying rather than be accused of child abuse.

Same here, the only reason I subscribe to their Extreme package is for the 100GB limit (and higher upload speed). I use a slingbox to watch TV from another country and that uses a lot of bandwidth.

5 gigs/mo is a joke.

A person can do that in a month on 56k dialup.

I use the internet a lot, but not for downloading. I use 1-2 GB each month, therefore a 5-10 GB limit for a user like me is not an issue. It's only the top couple of percent of users that find this limiting, and as indicated earlier, they should pay for being "bandwidth hogs" relative to most people.

Here are my recent usages.

Usage Period / Download / Upload / Total Usage (MB)
Apr 01/07 - Apr 30/07 / 1,820 / 236 / 2,056
Mar 01/07 - Mar 31/07 / 1,405 / 136 / 1,541
Feb 01/07 - Feb 28/07 / 1,263 / 145 / 1,408

Why should 95+% of users subsidize the heavy users? I would far prefer a "pay as you go" for a GB rate, especially if it results in my monthly bill being lower.

I already lowered my bill by going to Express instead of Extreme without noticing any performance difference for what I do. If it weren't such a big jump to the next speed down, I'd use that.

5 GB is too low. It pretty much makes high speed internet useless for anything but web browsing and email. I exceed 5 GB just by listening to streaming internet radio. So how ironic is this? Rogers bumps up speeds to make services like streaming audio/video and other interactive services usable but then slaps a huge premium on their use, making them unaffordable to many people. I agree with charging a premium for people who routinely download hundreds of gigabytes a month. Doing that for anyone who just wants to watch streaming content and maybe download a Linux DVD once in a while is nothing but a backhanded slap in the face and a corporate cash grab to boot. :mad:

p.s. Bell tried this with Sympatico several years ago and it took me a total of 1 week to switch providers.

10 gigs might be ok but I don't really appreciate the term "bandwidth hog" being applied to us users in the 5-10 gig range who actually use and pay extra for services that Rogers themselves are offering. It shows you're buying into the spin the ISP's are creating. A back of the envelope calculation shows me that listening to Rogers Yahoo Music Unlimited for just 2 hours a day gives a usage of 5 gigs a month.

If Rogers wants to drop their base monthly charge to say 25 bucks a month for 5 gigs and then charge an extra say $3/gig on top then I could support that. But what are the odds we'll see a minimal decrease in fees (say 10%) accompanied by a quite profitable extra gig surcharge?

By way of clarification. The term "bandwidth hogs" was aimed at people who are maxing out or going above the current limits of 60/100 Gigs, not people in the 5-10 range who would have nothing to fear from the possible changes and may actually save money.

My main concern was Rogers imposing a "hard cap" without the option of paying extra for more bandwidth. Pay-for-use is fine with me as long as it's reasonable.

I was also concerned that their network is over stressed. It's happening elsewhere. Time to buy some more Nortel and Cisco stock.

Maybe Rogers is allocating capital for a WiMAX push. That's probably where all communication is heading anyhow.

I think 5-10 GB is way too low. Bell Sympatico tried to impose a 5GB down and 5GB up cap about 5 years ago. That didn't go over to well.

I would say 20-30 GB a month is far more reasonable. If they capped internet usage to 5GB it would make broadband VOD, IPTV and other media completely unusable as you would go over the cap very quickly.

Does anyone have any confirmation of this? I under 60 GB was cap for most services; plus there is an overage charge per GB meaning you don't get cut-off or suspended.

I have a 100 GB cap. I don't even get close to the limit but it is nice not to have to worry about it. With the 10 GB cap that was once common, I had to check regularly and the usage reporting site was never up to date.

The caps they have now are ok. I downgraded mine from Extreme to Express because I haven't even reached close to the 100 gigs limit of Extreme and my download speed is not affected. The only thing that does slow down are the uploads, the rate of which is cut in half in contrast to Extreme. But since I don't upload that often I thought may as well save some money. In my view their current caps are decent and provide a good value. However, if they lower the Express cap to below what it is now, I'd definitely look elsewhere. Even if I don't use the entire 60 gigs every month, it's nice to know that I have the headroom if I need it. The bottom line is when people sign up to broadband Internet, they obviously want to do more than just browse CBC and read email. The people who want to do that can already buy a lower speed tier if they wish. But to impose ridiculous caps on more "power" users is just a dumb business decision altogether that will cost Rogers customers.