Blessed by the Potato

Just a quick note to the Rogers users out there: Rogers will begin charging for going over your monthly download cap (60 GB for Express, 100 GB for Extreme) soon. Of course, knowing Rogers, they’d never tell you that until you actually got a bill from them for it. The usage monitor tool (when it works) now shows the charge amount as well as your usage to date. At the moment the overage charge is $1.25/GB (which seems a little steep already), but that will be going up to $2/GB for Express (each tier is anticipated to have its own overage charge amount, Extreme at $1.50/GB, and Ultra-Lite at $2.75/GB), and the cap will be coming down (down?!) to 50 GB for Express. It is believed that the charges will go into effect in September, but will be waived until December (so if you just look at the bottom line of your bill, you might not notice until December, but if you look at the service breakdown, you may see a funny charge/refund set of lines starting this month… assuming you go over your cap). The maximum overage charge is anticipated to be $50 (though if you’re a 300 GB/mo downloader, Rogers may drop you).

Personally, this probably won’t affect me. When I had Extreme, the most I ever downloaded in a month was 62 GB, and that was when torrents worked and I was connected to a WoW server for half the day. My usage now is typically in the 20-40 GB range, but that’s just a little too close for comfort if the cap becomes 50 GB (especially if I get back into online gaming). It comes off as pretty scuzzy, especially with throttling being used as another measure to limit bandwidth use, and so many price increases seen in the past few years. If I thought the phone lines in this house could handle DSL, I’d probably switch to Teksavvy. (Unfortunately, half the phones in the house have a lot of audible static, which just can’t be good for DSL — and I still haven’t found the phone demark box in the basement).