Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Personal Finances and Consumer Concerns, essays, stories, examples and how to articles with a distinctly Canadian Point of View
August 25th, 2009

Rogers Cable and Overruns

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.

More on this topic (What's this?)
Check This Out! This Is Great Stuff! (The Technical Take, 3/15/10)
The (Almost) Accidental Millionaire (The Iconoclast Investor, 3/11/10)
It’s Not My Fault You’re An Idiot (The Wild Investor, 3/17/10)
Don Coxe webcast – updated (March 19, 2010) (Investment Postcards from Cape Town, 3/20/10)
Read more on Wilson Greatbatch Technologies, The Internet Impact, Computing at Wikinvest

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Posted in Computers, Consumer Advocacy, Home Expenses |

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 5:09 AM and is filed under Computers, Consumer Advocacy, Home Expenses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Rogers Cable and Overruns”

  1. Maria Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 6:57 AM

    Switch to TekSavvy! You can get unlimited bandwidth for $40/month. Their customer service is absolutely great; they even just let us stop the service for a month as we would be away.

  2. Mike Kolcun Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 7:08 AM

    I had a similar issue – switched from Rogers Cable internet to Acanac DSL. It’s a great product. Telephone support isn’t great, and I’d say that as a result I’d recommend this for more “advanced” users who can troubleshoot the odd problem.

    That being said, the service has been very stable, down a few times, and only for an hour or so, over the last 2 years.

    The best part – it’s cheap. $19/month taxes in for the first year, paid up front. After that prices go up to $35 ish/month taxes in.

    I also pay a $8/month dry loop fee, since I don’t have a Bell phone line. Even with this fee it’s cheaper than Rogers.

    No bandwidth limit, and though technically slower than rogers, I notice no difference in real-world speeds.

    If you do decide to sign up, it’d be great if you used my name as a referral.

    Thanks!

  3. Beth Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 7:19 AM

    It’s a shame that Rogers treats new customers better than it’s loyal ones. (I’ve been thinking of dropping Rogers for this reason).

    Let us know how this pans out :)

  4. Traciatim Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 7:39 AM

    You could set up a proxy that monitors traffic usage by machine and limit it internally. It’s interesting that they advertise 10Mbps+ (over 1MB/s) connections, but if you actually use just your cap your are limited to about 24KB/s of traffic. You could try installing NetLimiter Monitor on each machine to see who uses the most traffic. Making people accountable makes a huge difference.

    You could also switch to a provider that doesn’t suck. Sure, I only have a 7Mbps connection to my house (was 5 last week, they upped it recently, to compete with rogers) . . . but I can transfer as much as I want as long as it’s not deemed excessive. Which usually they reserve for people who set up home servers that serve illegal data.

  5. Canadian Personal Finance Blog » Blog Archive » bRogers Cable/b and b…/b « Welcome to SatTechCanada Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 8:57 AM

    [...] View original post here:  Canadian Personal Finance Blog » Blog Archive » bRogers Cable/b and b…/b [...]

  6. DAvid Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 10:09 AM

    Why not just pass the bill to your kids? If necessary, you could reduce their allowance at the source!

    DAvid

  7. Jerry Hung Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 12:40 PM

    +infinity for TekSavvy
    http://www.teksavvy.com/en/resdsl.asp?ID=7&mID=1

    $30/month for 200GB cap, $40/month for Unlimited
    I pay $29 after tax for the 200GB cap plan (group plan), as well as their landline at $22/month+tax

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