Ted? Byte me!!!

So, we get a notice in the mail from Rogers. We get LOTS of crap in the mail from them so I was expecting them to either ask me to pay them money or tout some new feature or service I have no need for and will not be subscribing too. Boy, were we surprised when I looked at this latest piece of dead tree.

Rogers is in the process of throttling bandwidth, limiting downloads and basically big brothering the whole damn thing. Oh wait, they are already doing so! In the information they sent, they were kind enough to point out how much bandwidth we had used in the last couple of months (November was exceptionally heavy with 170+GB transferred) and how much MORE we would have to pay according to their new rates. By their accounting, we need to "upgrade" our service to the highest one and pay them $100 for the privilege of a 95GB bandwidth cap and a $25 penalty ($1.20 I think per extra GB up to a max of $25) after that.

Well, I was contemplating a little change up in the homestead's service providers. this has given that concept a swift kick into reality. Look, I am all for a service charging a reasonable amount for what they provide but they are seriously pissing me off by taking advantage of those who don't know any better. At the top end of their chart, the service will provide 18Mps download and 1Mbps upload speeds. This seems much better than the 7Mbps down and 512Kbps up that we currently "enjoy". However, if you can show me ONE site that will allow an 18Mbps download speed, thereby justifying this outlay, I would sign up in a heartbeat. The fact is that there are none because commercial sites pay for the bandwidth they use and the other users you connect to are limited by the same crappy upload speeds that you are so the point is moot.

Sure, the larger pipe will allow more bittorrent streams BUT then we run into the hard cap limit. Do you really want someone telling you how much you can download? If they had said $100, no cap, and 2 or 3Mbps upload AND allow servers, then I would easily fork over the coin. But no, they would rather piss off a long time client and force me to look elsewhere. No, not to Bell Sympatico (unless an amazing sale comes up) as they were the first to perform this limited bandwidth stunt. There are smaller, reliable ISPs that allow servers, have decent pipe, and don't cap the bandwidth. I had started many times to look into alternatives but I am determined to tell the Rogers person that calls in exactly why I dropped their Internet bullshit service.

Oh yeah, as for email, I have a domain now so I am going to start using it to redirect our personal mail. We still use Gmail extensively for just about anything else anyhow. Sorry Ted, find someone else to finance that baseball team of yours. We are outta here.

Ciao, beeyatch!

Some links to consider:

http://www.canadianisp.com/

http://torrentfreak.com/canadian-isp-is-throttling-bittorrent-traffic/

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071105-bittorrent-blocking-goes-north-canadian-isp-admits-to-throttling-p2p.html