Buried beneath the noise surrounding Bell Canada’s effort to annoy independent ISPs and their customers, Canadian cable operator Rogers last week informed its customers they’d be facing new overage charges. In a several page letter sent to Rogers customers last week, the cable operator first goes out of their way to make their existing caps seem “abundant,” then alerts users that starting in June, they’ll be billed for going over their caps.

It’s insulting when an ISP’s marketing department resorts to calculating their caps in page views or e-mails sent in order to make it seem like they’re being reasonable (in this case 60GB equates to 6,291,456 e-mails and 1,572,864 page views, the letter kindly informs us, with pictures).

Users who go over Rogers’ 60GB monthly cap will now be charged up to $5 (36,600 seconds of third-world outsourced labor!) per gigabyte capped at $25 (2,500 gum drops or penny stocks!) monthly for all tiers. Of course there’s the slight problem that the tools they provide customers to track their bandwidth usage have never actually worked.

Rogers offers a variety of tiers with different speeds and caps U.S. users should keep an eye on, because the pricing and presentation is something many U.S. cable operators would very much like to bring to the States. These speeds range from an “Ultra-Light” tier with 2GB monthly cap (Grandma, EXTREME!) to their “Extreme Plus” 18Mbps package, with a 95 GB monthly cap. The caps and overage charges per tier:

Measuring usage this way more fairly reflects how our customers are using the service and allows us to maintain competitive monthly rates for all of our customers. -Rogers

It’s grandma and grandad who get hit hardest should they decide to “go wild” one month and use their connection to download an HD film. We’ll also note that Rogers has been one of the worst North American ISPs when it comes to throttling connections, not only throttling BitTorrent traffic extensively, but throttling all encrypted and VPN traffic as users attempted to get around the measures.

In an American market where ISPs are frightened of the consumer backlash to billing by the byte, the Rogers model could make its way here sooner than you think. While U.S. providers already offer different speed tiers, the idea of adding various caps to those tiers (complete with billing overages) is something that’s already being considered.
read comment(s)