Rogers Continues to Throttle BitTorrent Traffic, Despite Contentious Pricing Scheme
Written by Ernesto on April 09, 2008The 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
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Good thing I’m from Canada where Telus can’t even enforce GB limits, let alone throttle traffic.
Welcome to Australia
In my area they seem to have backed off on the upload throttling since Comcast got bit recently (with no changes beyond settings needed).
They have never applied their policies equally across the nation. I was able to continue downloading/seeding normally for some time after many others got throttled.
Of course service was always les suck even without throttling.
Either way I’m onboard for the class action whenever someone gets enough evidence to launch one.
that should have said “beyond good settings”
I just got this letter from rogers, and that when I decided it’s time to leave
I had Rogers two years ago. The speed was terrible with torrents, I phoned them and they went on about file sharing making it slow for email and such.
I stopped using them and went with Bell, who were plenty better then.
They sent me the letter.. Tells me to visit http://www.rogers.com/keepingpace to monitor usage.. After registering and giving acct details I still can’t keep track.. Hopefully ill get emails.. i finally just started seeing decent speeds again recently..
ummm time for techsavvy.ca
Jesus, fucking expensive, I pay like $30/month for my 100/100 Mbps non-limited broadband…
Man its sad how these ISP’s are looking for ways to cut there customers out, reminds me of the IFPI/RIAA or whatever the hell they call themselves these days.. something stupid.
The plan is fair, but its useless if your going to throttle bittorrent, are these people this stupid.. geez.
Thanks for the info from Canada. I will soon be shopping for a new provider and clearly it will not be Rogers. Best bet is probably a mom & pop reseller. Same network, less bullshit.
Anybody know if Bell Sympatico throttles BT traffic?
\o/ 13th
I made the switch from Rogers to Bell a few years ago due to throttling. When I called tech support at Rogers to complain about the shitty speeds they denied they knew anything about throttling. All except for one very nice tech guy who informed me that they do infact do that. He then told me he has bell at home for this very reason.
Stupid corporations selling us lies… :)
~ DDK
Ya Sympatico throttles between 6pm-2am.
You people need to read up what’s going on in the isp world –>
dslreports.com
If your looking to Bell (sympatico) they have also been throttling recently and have had quite a bit press coverage due to them also throttling traffic from wholesale DSL providers such as tekksavy. So if you think you will use them, think again. Bell pretty much screwed the entire DSL market in Canada.
—–
http://www.sbytes.info
In Serbia there is no restriction of any kind :D for 15 euros (20$) per month you can download anything you want and nobody will ask you anything :p
I personally am using Rogers Express, and with the help of Netmeter i found out that in March i downloaded a total of approximately 260GB of data (upload + download). Too bad i corrupted the log, otherwise i could get more accurate readings.
I think this is pathetic. I agree that charing per GB once over the limit is the right thing to do, but what’s the point of that if you’re going to throttle our connections anyways?
hmm, seems like rogers is in full support of newsgroups then
“Good thing I’m from Canada where Telus can’t even enforce GB limits, let alone throttle traffic.”
I am from Canada and I use Cogeco (Nothing else in my area really) and they throttle traffic.
1: shut up before telus hears you! lol
Yhea, Bell is even worse, they throttle their Sympatico service **AND** its competition. And it’s not because the competing ISPs are using their network, most of them get their traffic from other companies. But Bell owns the last mile–wire that goes from your home to their office–so that’s where they throttle. They don’t have a justification for it since the traffic from their competition doesn’t necesarly pass through their routers, it’s purely anti-competitive.
Today I am switching to teksavvy.ca and urge any Canadians to leave Bell and Rogers.
To be honest, I’ve been on Rogers since 1994 and theres never been a problem. I download via torrents like mad and theres no problem at all…But the new limit is kinda dumb, but if youre extreme plus, the highest they charge extra us $25 and you can keep going over the limit….
With unlimited dial up, you can transfer more than 17GB …do the math!
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