Rogers Continues to Throttle BitTorrent Traffic, Despite Contentious Pricing Scheme
The Canadian ISP Rogers recently introduced contentious hosting plans, which means that users have to pay for every extra gigabyte they consume. The problem is, however, that Rogers continues to throttle BitTorrent traffic, so most BitTorrent users will never reach their quota anyway.
Rogers‘ new pricing scheme (see image below) gets rid of the all-you-can-eat plans most ISPs offer, and charges customers for every additional gigabyte once they have reached their monthly quota. For example, customers with an “extreme plus” plan pay $99.95 a month for the first 95GB, and $1.25 for every additional gigabyte they consume.
Here’s what Rogers wrote in a letter to their customers: “With households doing more online every day – from downloading music and streaming videos to joining online communities – it’s important to have an Internet provider that evolves to meet your online needs. At Rogers, we remain committed to always providing you with the best Internet experience possible.”
Don’t get me wrong, a contentious pricing scheme makes sense. The more people consume, the more they pay, fair enough. What bothers most Rogers users is that, even with this new pricing scheme, their BitTorrent traffic is still being throttled.
Rogers was one of the early adopters of BitTorrent traffic shaping. The first reports date back to 2005, and last year Rogers even decided to block all encrypted traffic, just to make sure that BitTorrent protocol encryption didn’t work.
Nevertheless, Rogers plays nice to its customers, and says it is “committed to providing the best Internet experience as possible”, but how can this be true if their customers can hardly use BitTorrent?
In the letter they sent to their customers they mention that, with a monthly bandwidth limit of 95GB, users can download a whopping 24,320 songs a month. However, if Rogers continues to throttle BitTorrent traffic, it can take up to 67.6 months before their customers actually reach their quota.
In a response to the new pricing scheme, a Rogers subscriber told TorrentFreak: “Pretty funny actually, as with the throttling they are doing, I could downgrade my service considerably.”
Not to worry though, there are several tip and tricks to get around the traffic shaping devices rogers uses. For some, BitTorrent encryption is sufficient to circumvent Rogers’ throttling, others need to adjust a few extra settings to enjoy their torrents in full-speed.
Happy torrenting…
Rogers’ new pricing scheme
