Rogers Hi-Speed Internet — No Deals Here

It had to happen. The apparently coarse and transparent oafs who seem to be running many of the cable Internet providers have finally dropped the other shoe. After years of urging us to "get online and experience a world of information, digital photography, digital music, digital video, movies and entertainment" they've now got everyone hooked. So what better time than now to introduce blatantly abusive usage charges while remaining protected by rate increase legislation?

Rogers (in Canada) is just one example. Let's de-construct the first paragraph of the latest mailing to all Rogers business and residential customers:

"With households doing more online every day [at Rogers' urging - the company spends millions to market itself and its services every year] - from downloading music and streaming videos to joining online communities [Rogers of course already charges good money for music and video/TV streaming] - it's important to have an Internet provider that evolves to meet your changing needs [e.g., charging you for services for which it has already charged you]. At Rogers, we remain committed to always providing you with the best Internet experience possible [except for terrible business service, inaccurate records, service technicians who fail to arrive for a scheduled call, and throttling of the same client/server data exchanges for which its now going to charge extra fees]. That's why we are introducing changes to your current service that will help us to better meet your needs for speed, reliability and a continually improved network [read: we're effectively a monopoly in many parts of Canada, so we assigned our legal staff to find a regulatory loophole which allows us to charge more money for the exact same service!].

Bully for them.

According to Rogers, I am paying $54.95 per month (plus taxes) for a 10Mbps connection. The problem with that statement is simply that I've never achieved anything close to 10Mbps download speeds. Before starting to write this post at 10:30 AM EST in Toronto, I checked my connection speed at Toast.Net. The best I could do was 6.7Mbps. That's nowhere near 10Mbps. I tried the same tests at 1:00 AM this morning and the best I could do was 7.3Mbps. It doesn't matter what time of day you want to consider because the theoretical maximum speed on which all of Rogers customer marketing is based can rarely (if ever) be achieved in practice.

A curse on the collective corporate consciousness that eructs and promotes this sort of patented drivel. A curse on the regulatory boards and the government legislators who swallow the drivel. Rogers advertises speeds which it can't or won't deliver, but regulators seem blind to the situation. The Devil is in the details, but if nobody examines the details, the Devil has his way.

As of June 1, 2008, Rogers is going to cap monthly bandwidth traffic at 95GB for Extreme and Extreme Plus customers, and charge an additional $1.50 and $1.25/GB respectively for every GB over the limit (to a maximum of $25/month). Don't forget to calculate the additional cost the first time you decide to subscribe to a remote data backup service such as Carbonite, Mozy or even Dell's new service. That first 100GB backup could be a killer.

I really hate these people. They dig with buckets underneath the outhouse, run away with whatever they find, then reappear trying to sell us our own shit (or theirs) at inflated prices.