Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for August 25th, 2009

One of the problems of having a lot of computers around my house and having a large number of teenagers is that my Internet connection does get heavily used, but I hadn’t had any problems until last month.

My connection is with Rogers, and the current package that I have limits me to a total of 60 GB of throughput in a month. Normally this is not an issue, we barely make it to half way, however things seem to have changed in our usage. My kids have decided that watching TV is not interesting so they have taken to watching TV on line, and downloading shows as well, and this seems to have created a “tipping point” in our Internet Usage.

Last month we overran our 60 GB by 15 GB and I got a $30 charge added to my bill because of it. Needless to say I had a stern talk with my kids about this, but nothing much has changed this month and I predict the surcharge may even be higher.

I checked the Rogers web site and was not happy to see that the maximum over charge should be $25*. I wondered what the * meant so reading the fine print I saw that this was reserved for folks who have signed up in the past 1.5 years, but for folks like me who have been loyal Rogers’ customers for longer than that, the charges are uncapped and could go as high as my kids usage takes it.

I suspect I will be calling Rogers in the next day or so to ask them to either cap this fee or remove their product, but you can check your own usage on line to see if you are close to your limit, by logging onto Rogers.com and there is a “Monitor your Internet Usage” connection on the bottom of the page.

Needless to say there will be more stern words spoken in our house about Internet usage.